基于Agent分布式仪表产品造型协同设计应用研究

基于Agent代理,提出将Web技术和Multi-Agent技术融合的分布式协同设计系统,为产品设计过程中设计人员之间的信息共享和资源共享提供了更有效的方法.在分析系统体系结构的基础上,着重阐述了Multi-Agent代理模型和工作原理,并将其应用于仪表产品造型设计系统中,实现基于Agent的分布式仪表产品造型设计原型系统.     

A knowledge intensive multi-agent framework for cooperative/collaborative design modeling and decision support of assemblies

Multi-agent modeling has emerged as a promising discipline for dealing with decision making process in distributed information system applications. One of such applications is the modeling of distributed design or manufacturing processes which can link up various designs or manufacturing processes to form a virtual consortium on a global basis. This paper proposes a novel knowledge intensive multi-agent cooperative/collaborative framework for concurrent intelligent design and assembly planning, which integrates product design, design for assembly, assembly planning, assembly system design, and assembly simulation subjected to econo-technical evaluations. An AI protocol based method is proposed to facilitate the integration of intelligent agents for assembly design, planning, evaluation and simulation process. A unified class of knowledge intensive Petri nets is defined using the O-O knowledge-based Petri net approach and used as an AI protocol for handling both the integration and the negotiation problems among multi-agents. The detailed cooperative/collaborative mechanism and algorithms are given based on the knowledge objects cooperation formalisms. As such, the assembly-oriented design system can easily be implemented under the multi-agent-based knowledge-intensive Petri net framework with concurrent integration of multiple cooperative knowledge sources and software. Thus, product design and assembly planning can be carried out simultaneously and intelligently in an entirely computer-aided concurrent design and assembly planning system.     

PV-TONS: A photovoltaic technology ontology system for the design of PV-systems

The impacts of climate change, the increasing demand for energy and the diminishing fossil fuel resources have resulted in the development and use of a large number of renewable energy technologies in building development. These technologies are generating a huge amount of information which often overwhelms interested users and thus makes it difficult for them to make informed choices about their applications. The emergence of Semantic Web technologies, the next generation of Web technologies, promises to considerably improve representation, sharing and re-use of information to support decision-making. This article investigates how the emerging Semantic Web enabling technologies can be used to both represent information and knowledge about renewable energy technologies, and facilitate system decision-making in recommending appropriate choices for use in different situations. Based on a review of literature, a prototype Semantic Web system known as the photovoltaic technology ontology system (PV-TONS) for managing knowledge about PV-systems is developed to demonstrate some Semantic Web capabilities. PV-TONS includes Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) that provides a reasoning mechanism to facilitate system decision support. To validate PV-TONS, a green building that uses PV-systems to generate its energy was employed as a case study.     

Integrity validation in semantic engineering design environment

A collaborative engineering design environment has been devised based on semantic Web technologies. The Semantic Engineering Design Environment (SEDE) consists of Engineering Ontology, Design Rules, Design Database, and Design Data Web Service. The Design Data Web Service provides users APIs (Application Programming Interface) so that distributed Design Participants interface each other. The domain knowledge of design objects can be logically expressed by OWL (Web Ontology Language). Design rules regarding change management are encoded in XQuery and stored as database triggers. Once design data changes, associated design rules will be validated by database systems. In this paper we introduce the overall architecture of the collaborative engineering design environment and present working scenarios with examples.     

Toward a New Generation of Semantic Web Applications

Although research on integrating semantics with the Web started almost as soon as the Web was in place, a concrete Semantic Web that is, a large-scale collection of distributed semantic metadata emerged only over the past four to five years. The Semantic Web's embryonic nature is reflected in its existing applications. Most of these applications tend to produce and consume their own data, much like traditional knowledge- based applications, rather than actually exploiting the Semantic Web as a large-scale information source. These first-generation semantic Web applications typically use a single ontology that supports integration of resources selected at design time.     

支持异地协同产品设计的知识服务模型

提出基于XML元语言，以统一的信息化格式描述设计知识，使用Java技术构建了支持多专家协同设计的基本框架，将各类设计服务封装为Web服务的形式，实现了一种Web使能的知识服务模型(Web-KSS)，并应用该模型实现了支持成套电器产品设计的知识服务系统。     

Ontology-based assembly design and information sharing for collaborative product development

To realize a truly collaborative product design and development process, effective communication among design collaborators is a must. In other words, the design intent that is imposed in a product design should be seized and interpreted properly; heterogeneous modeling terms should be semantically processed both by design collaborators and intelligent systems. Ontologies in the Semantic Web can explicitly represent semantics and promote integrated and consistent access to data and services. Thus, if an ontology is used in a heterogeneous and distributed design collaboration, it will explicitly and persistently represent engineering relations that are imposed in an assembly design. Design intent can be captured by reasoning, and, in turn, as reasoned facts, it can be propagated and shared with design collaborators. This paper presents a new paradigm of ontology-based assembly design. In the framework, an assembly design (AsD) ontology serves as a formal, explicit specification of assembly design so that it makes assembly knowledge both machine-interpretable and to be shared. An Assembly Relation Model (ARM) is enhanced using ontologies that represent engineering, spatial, assembly, and joining relations of assembly in a way that promotes collaborative assembly information-sharing environments. In the developed AsD ontology, implicit AsD constraints are explicitly represented using OWL (Web Ontology Language) and SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language). This paper shows that the ability of the AsD ontology to be reasoned can capture both assembly and joining intents by a demonstration with a realistic mechanical assembly. Finally, this paper presents a new assembly design information-sharing framework and an assembly design browser for a collaborative product development.     

Trends in built environment semantic Web applications: Where are we today?

The built environment sector impacts significantly on communities. At the same time, it is the sector with the highest cost and environmental saving potentials provided effective strategies are implemented. The emerging Semantic Web promises new opportunities for efficient management of information and knowledge about various domains. While other domains, particularly bioinformatics have fully embraced the Semantic Web, knowledge about how the same has been applied to the built environment is sketchy. This study investigates the development and trend of Semantic Web applications in the built environment. Understanding the different applications of the Semantic Web is essential for evaluation, improvement and opening of new research. A review of over 120 refereed articles on built environment Semantic Web applications has been conducted. A classification of the different Semantic Web applications in relation to their year of application is presented to highlight the trend. Two major findings have emerged. Firstly, despite limited research about easy-to-use applications, progress is being made from often too-common ontological concepts to more innovative concepts such as Linked Data. Secondly, a shift from traditional construction applications to Semantic Web sustainable construction applications is gradually emerging. To conclude, research challenges, potential future development and research directions have been discussed.     

An agent-based approach to knowledge management in distributed design

The collaboration process among individuals with heterogeneous skills in a distributed virtual environment represents a crucial element of the extended enterprise. In order to achieve global optima in design, there is an increasing need for design teams to establish and maintain cooperative work through effective communication, co-location, coordination and collaboration at the knowledge level. Because of the distributed nature of users and information resources involved in the design process, the need for appropriate knowledge management tools is imperative. This paper proposes an agent-based architecture to support multi-disciplinary design teams that cooperate in a distributed design environment (DDE). Using ontologies and multi-agent systems (MAS), the proposed framework aims to optimise design process operation and management by supporting the dialogue among distributed design actors. Received: February 2005/Accepted: January 2006     

Measuring design complexity of semantic web ontologies

Ontology languages such as OWL are being widely used as the Semantic Web movement gains momentum. With the proliferation of the Semantic Web, more and more large-scale ontologies are being developed in real-world applications to represent and integrate knowledge and data. There is an increasing need for measuring the complexity of these ontologies in order for people to better understand, maintain, reuse and integrate them. In this paper, inspired by the concept of software metrics, we propose a suite of ontology metrics, at both the ontology-level and class-level, to measure the design complexity of ontologies. The proposed metrics are analytically evaluated against Weyuker’s criteria. We have also performed empirical analysis on public domain ontologies to show the characteristics and usefulness of the metrics. We point out possible applications of the proposed metrics to ontology quality control. We believe that the proposed metric suite is useful for managing ontology development projects.     

Semantic interoperability in building design: Methods and tools

Semantic interoperability is a crucial element to make building information models understandable and model data sharable across multiple design disciplines and heterogeneous computer systems. This paper presents a new approach and its software implementation for the development of building design objects with semantics of interoperable information to support semantic interoperability in building designs. The novelty of the approach includes its incorporation of building design domain ontology, object-based CAD information modeling, and interoperability standard to make building information models and model data semantically interoperable. A set of methods are proposed to address the issues of object-based building information representation compliant with the Industrial Foundation Classes (IFC); extension of IFC models with the supplementary information; and semantic annotation of the interoperable and extensible information sets. The prototype implementation of these methods provides a set of Web-enabled software tools for effectively generating, managing, and reusing the semantically interoperable building objects in design applications of architectural CAD, structural analysis, and building code conformance checking.     

SAaaS: a cloud computing service model using semantic‐based agent

Cloud computing, a common business model, provides cloud resources on demand to consumers over the Internet. However, because cloud computing lacks a uniform method of representing knowledge, which can offer customers a comprehensive solution for managing and developing cloud applications, cloud computing has low reuse potential. This work proposes a Semantic Agent as a Service (SAaaS), which was developed using Unified Modeling Language modelling. The SAaaS architecture is based on research into Cloud Computing, Semantic Web and Multi‐Agent Systems. The architecture can be combined with existing cloud service models, such as Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service, to design intelligent cloud computing applications. To demonstrate the efficacy of SAaaS, a Semantic‐based Project Resources Sharing Platform, an intelligent cloud computing application based on the SAaaS framework, is implemented to provide project resources on demand, consistent with the needs of project members.     

Multi-agent negotiation based on price schedules algorithm for distributed collaborative design

Collaborative design is a common practice in modern product development. Companies specializing in different disciplines, which are often geographically separated, work together to develop solutions for the benefit of overall design. In such inter-organizational collaboration, participants hiding individual skills and design rationales is highly desirable. To fulfill this requirement, this study proposes a negotiation mechanism based on a price schedules decomposition algorithm originally developed in economics. The mechanism searches for globally optimal designs, where no participant is necessary to own full knowledge of the entire design space. This paper also applies multi-agent system technologies to realize a secure environment for automating distributed collaborative design. A test scenario of distributed tolerance allocation in assembly design validates the proposed mechanism.     

面向普适计算的多Agent协同设计系统模型

根据普适计算的特点,提出了一种多agent协同设计系统框架模型.考虑到普适计算环境下移动设备的交互和多通道的信息集成,该模型在已有多agent协同设计系统的框架模型上增加了相应的agent,并且在设计agent的结构中包含了通道识别、上下文生成及多通道信息整合模块,以处理多通道的信息.详细介绍了在该agent模型中基于设计上下文的知识表示、搜索和更新式学习算法,以及协同设计系统中多agent知识共享的方法.该研究对于普适计算在设计领域中的应用有重要的意义.     

基于Petri网的机电产品概念设计功能模型研究

功能分析是概念设计中最重要的阶段,从黑箱法的理论出发,以流及其状态和功能为基本要素建立了基于Petri网的机电一体化产品概念设计功能模型,为产品概念设计过程的优化以及设计效率的提高打下了良好基础,为以后智能软件的开发提供了良好的模型.     

The Semantic Web: Collective Intelligence on the Web

The World Wide Web has turned hypertext into a success story by enabling world-wide sharing of unstructured information and informal knowledge. The Semantic Web targets the sharing of structured information and formal knowledge pursuing objectives of achieving collective intelligence on the Web. Germane to the structure of the Semantic Web is a layering and standardization of concerns. These concerns are reflected by an architecture of the Semantic Web that we present through a common use case. Semantic Web data for the use case is now found on the Web and is part of a quickly growing set of Semantic Web resources available for formal processing.     

Flexible coordinator design for modeling resource sharing in multi-agent systems

One approach to modeling multi-agent systems (MASs) is to employ a method that defines components which describe the local behavior of individual agents, as well as a special component, called a coordinator. The coordinator component coordinates the resource sharing behavior among the agents. The agent models define a set of local plans, and the combination of local plans and a coordinator defines a system’s global plan. Although earlier work has provided the base functionality needed to synthesize inter-agent resource sharing behavior for a global, conflict-free MAS environment, the lack of coordination flexibility limits the modeling capability at both the local plan level and the global plan level. In this paper, we describe a flexible design method that supports a range of coordinator components. The method defines four levels of coordination and an associated four-step coordinator generation process, which allows for the design of coordinators with increasing capabilities for handling complexity associated with resource coordination. Colored Petri net based simulation is used to analyze various properties that derive from different coordinators and synthesis of a reduced coordinator component is discussed for cases that involve homogeneous agents.     

本体驱动的知晓内容和上下文的知识路由研究

语义Web提供了实现对Web异构信息源智能访问和处理的平台。然而在语义Web上分布着海量知识,如何在这些海量知识中按照用户的需求快速准确的定位目标知识已成为语义Web迫切需要解决的问题。针对此问题,文章提出了一种知晓内容和上下文的语义Web知识路由机制。该机制采用基于本体和概念格的推理技术,通过捕捉用户需求内容和上下文等语义信息,能够快速准确地实现目标知识与服务的发现、定位、访问以及初步评估。