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Interagent ties in team-based computational configuration design

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2005

JESSE T. OLSON  and
JONATHAN CAGAN
JESSE T. OLSON
Affiliation:
Computational Design Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, USA
JONATHAN CAGAN
Affiliation:
Computational Design Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, USA
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Abstract

Organizational research has shown that effectively structuring the resources (human, informational, computational) available to an organization can significantly improve its collective computational capacity. Central to this improved capacity is the manner in which the organization's member agents are related. This study is an initial investigation into the role and potential of interagent ties in computational teaming. A computational team-based model, designed to more fully integrate agent ties, is created and presented. It is applied to a bulk manufacturing process-planning problem and its performance compared against a previously tested agent-based algorithm without these agent relationships. The performance of the new agent method showed significant improvement over the previous method: improving solution quality 280% and increasing solution identification per unit time an entire order of magnitude. A statistical examination of the new algorithm confirms that agent interdependencies are the strongest and most consistent performance effects leading to the observed improvements. This study illustrates that the interagent ties associated with team collaboration can be a highly effective method of improving computational design performance, and the results are promising indications that the application of organization constructs within a computational context may significantly improve computational problem solving.

Keywords

AgentsCollaborationComputational SynthesisConfiguration DesignTeams
Type
Research Article
Information
AI EDAM , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , May 2004 , pp. 135 - 152
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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