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Imagine a team of engineers is working on the design of a new truck. The first step in this type of project is the initial truck design consisting of a coarse-grained specification of all the major truck subsystems which are required to assess the basic vehicle properties. Examples of truck subsystems which are designed and evaluated at this stage include: the chassis, vehicle structure, axle kinematics, the brake system, vehicle stability, the suspension and the power train. Each of these design tasks requires different problem solving techniques, different support tools and above all, different skills and specialized knowledge. Initial vehicle design is therefore solved as a collaborative activity of a number of specialized problem solving agents - design engineers or computer programs. In the next section we will describe the three problems we address. We then describe the overall system architecture and the three support tools. In the final section we summarize our results.