Network distributed virtual design using coevolutionary agents

In an increasingly networked global marketplace, products and services are seldom created in isolation and are instead being realized through strategic and dynamic partnerships between suppliers, contract manufacturers, and customers. Superior design-supplier-manufacturing decisions are critical to the survival of enterprises that seek to compete in this environment. A novel evolutionary decision support framework (coevolutionary virtual design environment) particularly suited to distributed network-enabled organizations is introduced. In this framework an electronic interchange of design, supplier, and manufacturing information facilitates concurrent, network distributed decision-making based on evolutionary computation. The approach utilizes distributed evolutionary agents and mobile agents as principal entities that support a network-efficient exploration of planning alternatives in which successive populations systematically select planning alternatives that reduce cost and increase throughput.