TR113: The Federation of Collaborative Design Agents

The Federation of Collaborative Design Agents (FCDA) is an agent-based collaborative design framework that was developed as a part of a CIFE research project which started in early 1991. The initial objective of this project was to explore the use of agent-based architectures for the integration of distributed sofnvare applications in support of collaborative facility engineering. The initial development of the FCDA framework was carried out in cooperation with Michael Genesereth of Computer Science. His work on agent/facilitator architecture and its application to automated factory called Designworld provided the initial computing foundation for the FCDA framework [Genesereth 911 [Genesereth 941.

The research effort on the FCDA project has progressed in three phases. The first phase built on the concepts of agent architectures to develop the FCDA framework focusing on building design and construction planning. This phase resulted in the definition and development of the FCDA framework as well as a prototype environment for collaborative distributed building engineering called CIFE WORLD [Khedro 94al. The second phase of the project focused on collaboration issues among designers working in a geographically-dispersed environment. For this phase, a distributed collaborative CAD-based environment was developed and called AgentCAD [Khedro et al. 951. This environment has served as a testbed in a project-oriented Stanford course on Integrated AEC [Fruchter 96al. The third and final phase of the FCDA research effort involved four major universities in a funded project by the Construction Engineering Research Laboratory of US Army Corps of Engineers (USACERL) called Agent Collaboration Language Project (ACL Project). The objective of the ACL Project was to develop an Internet-based testbed for facility design and energy analysis. The testbed integrated independently-developed systems by Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, and USACERL [Khedro et al. 951. The cooperative research and development of the ACL Project testbed have examined and refined some aspects of the agent-based architecture supported by the FCDA framework.