Given a fast changing electronics goods marketplace, designers of integrated circuits and components need to be more competitive, efficient, flexible, and use collaborative workflow to reduce time-to-market and a project’s life cycle. In recent years, agent-based workflow management systems (WfMS) have been widely used to monitor and control business design processes. In this paper, intelligent agents are applied to the collaborative system-on-chip (SoC) design environment. The proposed JADE-based autonomous workflow management system (JAWMS) uses a workflow coordination mechanism and an agent integration mechanism to enable the analysis, management and interaction of automated design processes. The workflow coordination mechanism uses five domain specific agents to perform the workflow enactment services and a generic agent to control the system flow logic. The system kernel of JAWMS follows the specifications of the workflow reference model provided by the workflow management coalition (WfMC). The agent integration mechanism supports an agent to interact with other JADE-based agent platforms and to coordinate and monitor workflow coordination messages. All agents are written in the Java language using the JADE platform and work together to perform flexible, adaptive and dynamic design tasks in an autonomous and collaborative way. JAWMS facilitates SoC design and team interaction in a collaborative but distributed product development environment.
In the past decade, workflow management systems (WfMSs) have been distinguished due to their significance and their impact on organizations (Cardoso, Sheth, Miller, Arnold, & Kochut, 2004). Workflow management is a promising technology that automates the business processes to improve the speed, efficiency and manageability of an organization’s teamwork (Wang, Wang, & Xu, 2005). In order to reduce time-to-market and a project’s life cycle, many organizations propose workflow management system as a mechanism to facilitate teamwork in a collaborative product development environment (Huang et al., 2000 and Huang et al., 2003). However, due to the lack of flexible and integrated mechanisms to deal with data exchange and application integration between heterogeneous systems, traditional workflow management is often too inflexible to meet the complex, dynamic situations in distributed, heterogeneous platforms. Recently, the use of agents for collaborative design has been demonstrated (Trappey, Trappey, Hou, & Chen, 2004). Researchers apply agent technology in the workflow system to achieve the benefits of autonomy, reactivity, pro-activeness, and mobility (Huang et al., 2006, Kuo, 2004 and Xia and Li, 1999). There remain several issues with the use of agent-based systems. The problem of coordination and communication between agents and agent-based platforms is often the central focus of the research (Xia & Li, 1999).
In this paper, an autonomous workflow management framework based on multi-agent technology for collaborative system-on-chip (SoC) design is proposed. The proposed framework, named as JADE-based autonomous workflow management system (JAWMS), follows the specifications of the workflow reference model defined by the workflow management coalition (WfMC, 1999). In order to enhance the cooperation and coordination between agents, workflow ontology is created and a standardized workflow metadata model is implemented. JAWMS use a workflow coordination mechanism and an agent integration mechanism, in which a society of intelligent agents work autonomously and collaboratively to perform design tasks. The workflow coordination mechanism uses five domain specific agents to perform the workflow enactment services and a generic agent to control the system flow logic. The agent integration mechanism supports an agent to interact with other agent platforms and to coordinate with workflow coordination mechanism. Further, the java agent development framework (JADE) (JADE, 2007) is used as the agent platform for linking the heterogeneous SoC design systems in a distributed environment.
The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, we adopt multi-agent technology to develop an autonomous workflow management system for collaborative system-on-chip (SoC) design. The proposed framework suits the heterogeneous environment of electronic component design firms. Second, the workflow ontology is enhanced and clarifies the relationship between workflow components. The goals of the proposed system include ease of construction, interoperability, and information transparency.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews the related literature in the areas of workflow management systems, agent technology, and JADE platforms. Section 3 describes the collaborative SoC design process and environment and provides a workflow diagram for SoC design. Section 4 illustrates our autonomous workflow system framework, the workflow ontology, and the agent communication model. Based on this framework, a prototype of an autonomous workflow management system for collaborative system-on-chip (SoC) design is developed. The last section summarizes the contributions and provides suggestions for future work.
Collaborative IC design is a complex workflow. One of the challenges for workflow system development is to provide better interoperability and transparency for heterogeneous platforms. In this research, we propose a JADE-based autonomous workflow management system (JAWMS) for collaborative IC product design. Using the JADE agent framework to establish communications in distributed environments, JAWMS successfully increases interoperability and information transparency in distributed environments.
The major contribution in this paper is the development of a novel system architecture for multi-agent WfMS applied to collaborative IC design. In addition, the proposed system applies workflow metadata ontology as the data modeling standard for JAWMS. In summary, the system provides the following advantages as a collaborative design workflow management tool.
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The prototype facilitates design cooperation and teamwork communication in a collaborative product development environment.
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The platform increases interoperability in cross-platform, distributed environments.
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The use of a workflow definition template based on workflow metadata ontology increases the flexibility of the system.
