Agent-based assistance for engineering change management: An implementation prototype

Computer-aided design organizations worry much about the management of the communication between the various multidisciplinary teams working on the same project. The good management of this communication is very important for the success of the engineering change management process. Each discipline must approve or reject a change request according to its constraints and inform the other disciplines involved. Currently, the communication between the various disciplines is performed using messages. The approval or the rejection of a change request can be made only if human experts representing these disciplines meet and negotiate, which in turn can be very time consuming. Organizations thus, have a great need for a system which could automate the communication between experts and assist them in making sound engineering change decisions. Such a system could also help by reducing the time needed to verify an engineering change request therefore accelerating the production start-up and the time to market. This paper proposes an agent-based system that can manage the engineering change requests efficiently. Actually, the proposed system checks if the engineering change request does not create any inconsistency with the constraints stemming from the various disciplines. It also assists experts in making decisions by proposing alternative solutions. Each discipline is represented by an expert agent. When an inconsistency is discovered, a negotiation process among expert agents is launched. The system proposed could be easily connected to various CAD tools.