Preparing Students for a Collaborative Engineering Design Work Environment: A Study of Practicing Engineers

From time to time the Royal Society organizes meetings for the discussion of some new development in engineering and applied science. It seemed possible to the organizers of this meeting that it would be profitable to bring together workers in industry and in the universities to discuss some aspect of computer-aided design. As you will see we have chosen the application of computer aids to mechanical engineering design and manufacture. This restriction to mechanical engineering was deliberate, partly because the application of computer aids to mechanical engineering design is somewhat behind similar activities in electrical and civil engineering. Another reason is that the development of such applications has reached a particularly interesting stage, and it is now perhaps appropriate to review progress and to discuss the directions in which future research should proceed. Although some examples of computer-aided design in mechanical engineering can be found from the earliest days of computing, the development really started in the late fifties with early experiments in the use of graphic displays and with the introduction of multi-access computing. Some may date the beginning of the developments which we are going to discuss today, from the work at M. I. T. on automated programmed drawing started in 1958. This has led to a concentration of effort on graphics and computer-aided drafting. Much research has been done on the mathematical description of curves, surfaces and volumes in a form suitable for engineering design. Work has been done on the automatic dimensioning of drawings, hidden line removal, the problems of lofting, etc.

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A Collaborative Engineering Design Research Model—An Aerospace Manufacturer’s View

Impact of Design Research on Industrial Practice ◽

10.1007/978-3-319-19449-3_24 ◽

2015 ◽

pp. 363-381 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Ola Isaksson

Keyword(s):

Engineering Design ◽

Design Research ◽

Research Model ◽

Collaborative Engineering

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Work Structure Based Collaborative Engineering Design

Volume 3a: 8th Design for Manufacturing Conference ◽

10.1115/detc2003/dtm-48681 ◽

2003 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Li Zhao ◽

Yan Jin

Keyword(s):

Engineering Design ◽

Intelligent Agents ◽

Collaborative Design ◽

Process Model ◽

Workflow Management ◽

Process Efficiency ◽

Management Approach ◽

Collaborative Engineering ◽

Engineering Work ◽

Work Structure

Collaborative engineering design requires multiple people working together to achieve a common goal. Data sharing approach and workflow management approach have been developed to support collaborative design, but the disconnection of these two approaches has led to problems of efficiency and adaptability. In this paper, we propose a work structure based approach for collaborative design. Our goal is to improve process efficiency and adaptability by integrating management processes with engineering details and allowing designers to make certain managerial decisions through peer coordination. For a specific task, a work structure is a network of engineering work items connected by dynamically acquired engineering dependencies. It is used to generate multiple processes from which the one that best fits the current situation is dynamically determined through coordination among team participants. In order to capture engineering dependencies and associate engineering details, an adaptive work process model is developed that explicitly represents engineering work, work structure, and processes. Based on this model, a set of operations and algorithms are developed for intelligent agents to provide coordination support. Experiments have shown that by following this approach, engineering design processes can dynamically adapt to both requirement and resource changes, and the process efficiency can be significantly improved.

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A Multi-Agent Framework for Collaborative Engineering Design and Optimization

Volume 4: 24th Computers and Information in Engineering Conference ◽

10.1115/detc2004-57686 ◽

2004 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Qi Hao ◽

Weiming Shen ◽

Zhan Zhang ◽

Seong-Whan Park ◽

Jai-Kyung Lee

Keyword(s):

Engineering Design ◽

Rapid Development ◽

Autonomous Agent ◽

Multi Agent Systems ◽

Engineering Project ◽

Development Environment ◽

Collaborative Engineering ◽

Heterogeneous Agent ◽

Design And Optimization ◽

Multi Agent

Agent technology is playing an increasingly important role in developing intelligent, distributed and collaborative applications. The innate difficulties of interoperation between heterogeneous agent communities and rapid construction of multi-agent systems have motivated the emergence of FIPA specifications and the proliferation of multi-agent system platforms or toolkits that implement FIPA specifications. In this paper, a FIPA compliant multi-agent framework called AADE (Autonomous Agent Development Environment) is presented. This framework, originating from the engineering fields, can facilitate the rapid development of collaborative engineering applications (especially in engineering design and manufacturing fields) through the provision of reusable packages of agent-level components and programming tools. An agent oriented engineering project on the development of an e-engineering design and optimization environment is designed and developed based on the facilities provided by the AADE framework.

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