Under the concept of a global economy, enterprises are assigning
design and production environments around the world in different
areas. A serious issue of information exchange emerges as companies
use traditional hardware and very distinct software appropriate
to their field of expertise. To overcome the problem of low
productivity due to the interruption of information, the concept
of simultaneous engineering and concurrent design becomes very
significant. In this article an agent-based ship design system
is developed to support cooperation in distributed ship design
environments. Above all, the conflicts that occur while sharing
knowledge in the system must be resolved. One approach is to
adopt a case-based conflict resolution strategy formulated to
resolve current conflict on the basis of similar previously
resolved cases in agent-based collaborative design system
environments. To do this, conflict cases that occur in the initial
ship design stage are extracted. On the basis of the extracted
cases, a case base is constructed. In addition, a conflict
resolution handler located in the superagent called a facilitator,
an agent to control other subagents, is developed to treat conflict
problems effectively by case-based reasoning. The case-based
conflict resolution strategy is evaluated by applying it to
a collaborative design process in the initial ship design stage,
especially the machinery outfitting design, the preliminary
design, the hullform design, and the structural design. Through
the help of the collaboration of the design agents, the
facilitator, the conflict resolution handler, and the case-based
system, a designer can make decisions based on similar previously
resolved cases.