Personal assistant agents for collaborative design environments

Intelligent software agents have been recognized as a promising approach for the development of collaborative engineering environments. This paper presents our recent work on developing personal assistant agents to support users working within collaborative design environments (CDE). It describes a cognitive user model as a composition of the user's interest and behavior models. An intelligent assistance architecture is proposed to integrate these models with other environment models as well as inference, knowledge update and collaboration components. All these models and components collectively enable personal assistant agents to effectively work with the corresponding users to achieve their goals in a collaborative environment. The proposed user model is implemented in a coordinated, intelligent, rational agent (CIR-Agent) model on a FIPA (Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents)-compliant platform. Two case studies have been carried out to demonstrate the proposed agent-based intelligent assistance approach. (C) 2006 Published by Elsevier B.V.