An agent-based system to build project memories during engineering projects

Engineering projects are organizations where several actors with different professional fields and know-how work together to carry out the same aim: to develop a new product. Inside these organizations, heterogeneous and distributed information has to be managed in order to create project memories that will be useful in future projects. In this paper we describe a Multi-Agent System (MAS), which is based on the social and cooperative approach to support the knowledge management process all along mechanical design projects, Indeed, this multi-agent system, called KATRAS, aims to capitalize and reuse knowledge according to the roles involved in the design projects. We will present in this paper how the agents capitalize six different types of knowledge (professional vocabulary, process, expertise, project evolution, and return of experience) and how they help the professional actors to reuse knowledge. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.