~ ~ The following chapter is an overview of the current research in areas relevant to this thesis. There are three areas from which this thesis could be viewed, and literature relevant to each view was examined. The first is the Concurrent Engineering (CE) view. The second is the Artificial Intelligence (AI) view. Finally, there is the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) view. There were several pieces of literature from which no specific ideas were drawn for this thesis, but which were necessary to gain the background needed to understand other work being done. These are referenced in the Bibliography, but no formal summary of that work is included.
Section 
describes some of the work being done in CE, as well as
related work in Design For Manufacture (DFM), and tools used in design
software. Section is an overview of some of the issues facing
the choice of an implementation for the intelligent agents that were to be
used. Section discusses some of the work being done on
building user-interfaces, especially for design systems.