An architecture for an intelligent support system for design validation and manufacturing of aerospace components

This paper presents the architecture of a multi‐agent system that aims to support the design and manufacturing processes of composite material components for the aerospace, automobile, ship and other industries. The major goals are to accelerate the design process while minimising cost; support users in selecting the optimum material in terms of its properties, cost and environmental impact; and enhance the efficiency of the component manufacturing phase by extending the decision support capabilities of the existing real‐time monitoring software. An important requirement for achieving these objectives is to enable the more efficient utilisation of existing distributed information on composite materials. To this end, state‐of‐the‐art advances in metadata concepts were adopted and extended. By implementing metadata structures for each data category available, the searching and retrieval mechanisms are improved both in terms of speed and usage. In addition, large amounts of knowledge about the design and manufacturing processes themselves are incorporated into a multi‐agent environment in order to enhance the ability to support the user groups involved in the various stages of component design and manufacturing. In order to present the system architecture here, an example from the aerospace industry has been used.