Agent Based System that Supports Reliability Transport Engineering

There is already a worldwide research involved in Intelligent Transport Systems, Examples of those large research programs from the nineties are IVHS (Intelligent Vehicle-Highway System) in the United States and DRIVE (Dedicated Road Infrastructure for Vehicle safety in Europe) and PROMETHEUS in Europe. These research programs have given an important impetus to the future use of Artificial Intelligence in the transport field. Despite this only a relatively small number of technologies have reached the market and this has been a disappointment. A key difficulty is the distributed nature of ITS design team and the responsibilities are divided between government agencies and industry. The aim of the project described in this paper is to close the gap between the use phase and the design phase of the product life cycle, so that design of new products is augmented. This paper presents a solution for a new knowledge management support tool using Artificial Intelligence for the designer (using multi agent and ontology principles) to create and manage data flows between maintenance, warranty and design functions so that future designs can be improved. The paper commences with a brief introduction to the problem giving some background to the project. Next the paper presents a new approach to knowledge management for intelligent product design. Finally an architecture for the new system is presented. Conclusions are drawn and future work is presented at the end of the paper.