Agents, ProcessLink and virtual enterprises
At Stanford's Center for Design Research, from 1993, he applied Redux to concurrent engineering: many designers, many tools, one evolving design. Redux' was the process-coordination server; ProcessLink was the agent-based framework around it for coordinating heterogeneous design tools. The first application was the design of aircraft electrical cable systems, and there was a Toshiba consumer-electronics project. The work was part of MADEFAST, a DARPA experiment in distributed engineering with Larry Leifer and Mark Cutkosky.
The infrastructure result was JATLite, a Java agent infrastructure with message routing, published in IEEE Internet Computing in 2000. His 1996 IEEE Expert article, Agent-Based Engineering, the Web, and Intelligence, and his PAAM 2000 talk on agent-based software engineering set out the position: agents were a way to build engineering systems out of independent tools that exchange messages and share a model of the design, so that a change in one place propagates to the people it affects.
By 2003 the vocabulary was web services. His survey with Christoph Bussler, Service Agents and Virtual Enterprises, framed the question that occupied his Logic Group years: how to compose services from different companies into a temporary, dynamic enterprise, with the semantics needed to do it automatically.
Sources: his Stanford bio; his CV. Where this page paraphrases him, the paraphrase is ours and the source is his.
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