Coordinating Agents in Design: A Formal Analysis
U.V. Johar · Journal of Intelligent Systems · 1998
Coordination is one source of the problems of unreliability, high maintenance costs, and time overruns in large design problems.We propose a set of formal requirements for autonomous intelligent agents that support the coordination process.These requirements can be used to build agents that know when an act of coordination is necessary, who (which designers) need to be involved, and what information needs to be communicated to the designers. IntroductionLarge scale design tends to be a complex collaborative activity.The complexity in design arises from two types of uncertainities: (1) those associated with the incomplete knowledge of the activities of other designers (for example, software design often involves the development of "different modules, written by different people, at different times, in different languages" /16/; and (2) those associated with the lack of complete specification of the problem because of the ill-structured nature of design /31 /.These uncertainties lead to several coordination-and control-related design issues that lead to delays (increased time-to-market) 1221, persistent design errors /4/, and higher project costs /26/>.Further, design groups