An agent-based web services solution to collaborative product design

In today’s global world, manufacturers are facing many challenges such as product design with distributed and collaborative workflows. Complexity in collaborative product design arises from the need to synthesize different perspectives of a problem. Specifically, dependency identification of the product design process, as well as integration and sharing of computing application among the design teams that are critical for efficiency of manufacturability. Web services are considered to be the key to collaborative product design through the Internet. Web services alone are passive whereas agents can provide alerts and updates when new information becomes available. In this paper, an agent-based Web services architecture is proposed and applied to augment manufacturability. Not only the agent-based Web services architecture makes system interoperation feasible, but also increases the efficiency of the distributed collaboration. © 2005 - IOS Press and the authors.