A port-based information delivery for collaborative conceptual design

The function and structure of product have become more and more complicated. Port-based information delivery (PBID) has been paid attention to represent for functional modeling of product. It can conveniently capture the definition of component and corresponding design knowledge, so it is easy to synthesize design schemes. This paper proposes an approach to PBID for collaborative conceptual design. A port-based knowledge building process is described for functional modeling. It has a system structure with three port types and three knowledge layers. A port-agent collaborative design framework is given to help designer to create, edit and revise port types and obtain new design schemes. An application case is illustrated to demonstrate the effectiveness of the research.