Supporting the Rapid Product Development Requirments by a Viable Software Architecture

The Rapid Product Development (RPD) as a technique for design of innovative products is characterized by interaction of development teams distributed in time and space, with different responsibilities, background in various domains, by fast reaction to market changes and by coordination of necessary actions for every development phase between these groups. Nowadays product development is influenced from information technology and informatics with their respective fields of distributed systems, knowledge representation and agent technology. Major challenge in product development systems is the selection of an adequate representation form of knowledge presentation together with the mechanisms for its communication and control. We designed a system architecture, characterized by its integrative and holistic approach, for supporting the domain of RPD. As a promising way for solving problems related to separation of services, finding an intelligent solution and synchronization of design teams we apply a multi-agent system (MAS) as a middleware to an Active Semantic Network (ASN) as a knowledge representation model.