Recipe, Policy and Self-Organizing: A Hybrid Collaboration Approach for Agent-Based Cooperative Design

Cooperative design is distinguished from other cooperative behaviors by its inherent requirement for creativity. It is usually an ill-structured problem without complete and precise prescription. However, current agent-based cooperative design systems, which simply apply traditional multi-agent models to the domain of cooperative design, lack the adaptation to meet this essential requirement, so cannot be well applied. This paper proposes a hybrid multi-agent collaboration mode integrating determinate (recipe-guided) collaboration, policy-compliant collaboration and self-organizing mechanism for cooperative design. Determinate collaboration is suitable for those problems with determinate solutions in the design, while policy-compliant collaboration and self-organizing mechanism have advantages in dynamic regulations and loosely-coupled collaboration, which is necessary for creative work. They are complementary to each problem domain. Hence the hybrid mode is adaptive and flexible to broad organizing requirements of cooperative design process. The RPA_CPI agent model constructed for the hybrid collaboration mode is the core of the system, and thus formally specified in this paper. A case study is also given in this paper