Enhancing automated process design with cognitive agents, distributed software components and web repositories

Abstract

A novel problem-solving environment for automated process design, which integrates cognitive agents, web repositories and distributed software components with an existing automated process design tool, is presented. It is shown how the approach offers the potential for significant improvements in two key aspects of design, namely, problem formulation and innovation. Note that by improving the quality of the solutions space, the approach directly supports optimization.

Keywords:

• Automated process design
• Cognitive agents
• Software components
• MINLP

Acknowledgements

Work supported by Project COGENTS, Agent-Based Architecture For Numerical Simulation, funded by the European Community under the Information Society Technologies Programme (IST), under contract IST-2001-34431.

Notes

^†The term COGent derives from CAPE-OPEN Agent. Details of the CAPE-OPEN effort can be found at www.colan.org. In the following, this is used to denote the agents developed in the COGents Project.

^†In fact, the second reaction is incidental, in that preferably it would not arise. Nevertheless, be aware of it as additional chemical components are introduced into the process.