Knowledge modelling for supporting decision making in optimal distributed design process

Abstract

A methodology for distributed knowledge modeling will be presented in this article, in order to contribute to a better decision making during design problems analysis -- An optimal design process refers to setting up coherent numerical models and it requires a well structured problem definition -- However, a lack of downstream information in early stages of product development leads to a complicated elicitation task that became an issue due to nowadays distributed environments -- A Multi-Agent approach is proposed to support the distributed knowledge elicitation process -- A set of agents will guide members from the distributed design team, throughout the product life cycle, to extract relevant information and analyze it -- The interaction among agents will highlight potential incoherencies during the modeling process, in order to enable partners to avoid inconsistent information -- A coherent knowledge base is then constructed and ready to be used to create models to be analyzed by traditional inference engines such as optimization solvers,constraint satisfaction programming, etc