A multi-agent system for building project memories to facilitate the design process

Abstract

This article presents a project memory architecture and an organizational approach to building it. This work is the result of the analysis and follow-up of product development projects in a medium-sized company of four hundred employees. The development of a product is a multi-disciplinary project where engineers with different specialisation work together to achieve the same goal. These professional actors carry out tasks related to the stages defined by product development lifecycle. Each stage requires the contribution of know-how and knowledge in order to achieve the goals laid down. Our approach is to study each stage of the process of engineering and to define the knowledge which must be capitalize in order to organize a project memory. Afterwards we model this process in using as organisational approach in order to identify Knowledge resulting from the interaction of Professional Actors. From this modelling we have defined a multi-agent system to manage knowledge. We present this multi-agent system which is able to capitalize knowledge from an e-Groupware and to build and transmit project memories to professional actors.