SYMBAD—Similarity based agents for design

This paper presents the SYMBAD (similarity based agents for design) system, exploring multi-agent aspects in an architecture company, capturing, cataloging, and communicating information produced by the team members. The main task managed by the designers is to build stands to present the image of a company, project its presence in the market and emphasize the corporate identity to all prospects. From conceptual design to the construction of a final product, a stand project passes through many hands, each one adding bits and pieces until it is completed. Reuse of materials and ideas is less feasible as design complexity increases. The processes and problems in stand projects are quite common and can be easily found in other design situations. We present an agent framework to improve process awareness in an architecture company. The agents instrument the process to produce global awareness, to facilitate reuse and optimize the process as a whole. In this paper we present the agent architecture, as well as each agent’s general functioning and reasoning rules.