AUTONOMOUS VISUALIZATION AGENTS TO ENHANCE THE ANALYSIS OF VIRTUAL PROTOTYPES
Year: 2011
Editor: Culley, S.J.; Hicks, B.J.; McAloone, T.C.; Howard, T.J. & Dong, A.
Author: Radkowski, Rafael; Gausemeier, Jürgen
Series: ICED
Section: Design Methods and Tools Part 2
Page(s): 413-425
Abstract
A virtual prototype specifies the shape and the behavior of a product under development. However, it is a computer-internal representation of this product and suitable visualization techniques are necessary to understand the structure and behavior of it. Today visualization techniques are selected manually by the developers; that is time consuming and error-prone. In this paper, we introduce the concept of autonomous visualization agents: software agents that select autonomously a proper visualization for a certain task. To realize such agents an agent model to represent the knowledge of the agent, as well as a reasoning mechanism are necessary; both are introduced. Experiments have been carried out to test the correctness and the usability of the models and the reasoning mechanism. The experiments show that the models and the reasoning mechanism facilitate the autonomous selection of visualizations by software agents.
Keywords: VIRTUAL PROTOTYPING; SOFTWARE AGENTS; RESOURCE DESCRIPTION FRAMEWORK