A process-oriented multi-agent system development approach to support
the cooperation-activities of concurrent new product development
Computers & Industrial Engineering, 57 (4):
1363--1376 (November 2009)DOI: 10.1016/j.cie.2009.07.004
Abstract
In the recent decade, concurrent new product development (CNPD) has
been recognized as an effective approach for eliminating the long
and costly product development cycle. CNPD needs multi-disciplinary
workgroups to communicate and cooperate in a computer network environment,
particularly a multi-agent system (MAS) environment. Recently, several
MAS development approaches for CNPD cooperation have been proposed.
These approaches constitute on a goal basis and this will confine
the application of developed MAS to the pre-defined goals. However,
in a complete CNPD process, different cooperation requirements take
place at different stages and need different workgroups to be involved.
Consequently, the goal-driven MAS development approaches can only
provide a partial solution to the overall cooperation requirements
of a CNPD process.
This research has proposed a process-oriented approach to develop
MAS for all CNPD cooperation requirements. This approach is acting
on two phases: the process-oriented cooperation requirements analysis
phase and the MAS specification design phase. The process-oriented
cooperation requirements analysis phase first defines the desired
CNPD process and cooperation workflow based on the company-specific
organizational structure and practice. Next, the MAS specification
design phase derives the MAS specification, including the agent classes,
their conversations and system configuration, from the defined CNPD
process and cooperation workflow. Besides, an empirical case is used
to explain the proposed approach and to verify the feasibility of
the proposed approach on the Java Agent Development Framework (JADE).
