This project adopts a multi-agent approach to the integration of product design, manufacturability analysis, process
    planning, and assembly in a distributed manner. The objective is to develop a distributed concurrent engineering system,
    in which heterogeneous individual entities geographically dispersed can work cooperatively towards overall system goals.
    We present an agent-based concurrent engineering system concerning product design and planning, and highlight its
    fundamental framework and functions. Our model provides support to take constraints and requirements from the different
    product development cycles into consideration in early development phases and thus design-for-manufacturability is
    supported. Our methodology uses collaborative product design to assess the product manufacturability, while conflicts
    resolution (CR) techniques and design-improvement suggestions are employed to refine the initial product design. Our
    model comprises four service agents and a facilitator agent. Each service agent is used to model different product
    development phases, while the facilitator is responsible for the decomposition and dispatch of tasks, and solving the
    conflicts  which arise when a product design is found to be poor for manufacturing and/or assembly. The contributions of
    the project are fourfold. First, we develop a framework for integrating all the essential components of concurrent
    engineering so as to ensure adequate collaboration among the processes involved in development. Second, we model and
    group distributed entities in a federated approach to ensure system-level reconfigurability and scalability and
    implementational simplicity. Third, our implementation methodology provides an effective way of making heterogeneous
    legacy software tools capable of communicating and coordinating with others over the Web through the use of Java-based
    agent wrapper techniques. Fourth, the whole system is based on the Java, so agents are platform-independent, which
    makes them able to move around over the Internet and run unaltered on all platforms that supports Java.

    A prototype system for product design and planning on machining processes was implemented. This system comprises a
    Facilitator, a Design Agent, a Capability Agent and a Process Planning Agent. The performance of the prototype system
    shows that it could be extended to include other service agents to become a comprehensive distributed concurrent
    engineering system for geographically dispersed customers and suppliers.