Evolutionary Decision Support for Distributed Virtual Design in Modular Product Manufacturing

Abstract

Superior design-manufacturing-supplier decisions are critical to the survival of modern enterprises that seek to compete in a dynamic global marketplace. An evolutionary decision support system (virtual design environment) that supports such decision-making is introduced. The VDE framework utilizes evolutionary agents as program entities that generate and execute queries among distributed and heterogeneous computing applications and information resources. Evolutionary agents support a global optimization of design-manufacturing-supplier planning decisions by retrieving appropriate information from distributed information repositories, and fostering the systematic selection of planning alternatives that reduce cost and increase throughput. This paper introduces a general formulation of the design-manufacturing-supplier planning decision problem that is applicable to a variety of assembly-oriented design-manufacturing domains. We present a description of the prototype VDE that has been used to examine planning decisions for a real commercial electronic circuit board product (Pitney Bowes).