Supporting evolution in a multi-agent cooperative design environment

New architectures for next-generation of computer-aided design environments need to be distributed, evolutive, and cooperative. This paper presents a multi-agent design environment that supports cooperative and evolutionary design by cooperation of a group of agents. Multi-agent system architecture offers a promising framework with its novel approach for dynamically creating and managing agent communities in widely distributed and ever-changing design environments; while the genetic algorithm based approach provides a foundation for supporting evolutionary and innovative design abilities. The computational and information processing processes involved in evolutionary and distributed environment are discussed in this paper.