A process-oriented multi-agent system development approach to support the cooperation-activities of concurrent new product development

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).