A Cooperative Approach in Mechanism Design

In the present paper, we intend to propose special configurations of coupling between distributed agents, to achieve an optimal dimensional synthesis of a fourbar mechanism. As any conventional optimisation problem, this one often fails in local minima because of its nine variables characterisation. A distribution (Bond et al, 1988), (Ferber, 1995), (Garro et al, 1995), (Sichman et al, 1992) of the study allows a cooperation between actors (reactive agents as optimisers and constraint agents, or cognitive agents as a designer) working towards different goals, with different criteria. This cooperation leads to a global convergence for a given priority set. Thus our solution is to propose a timebased priority that keeps the independence of the agents. No supervisor agent is introduced. Results show the existence of a set of configurations for the agent priorities, ensuring a good global convergence.