AN INTEGRATED MULTI-AGENT CSCW SYSTEM FOR CONCURRENT PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Product development capability is more and more important for an enterprise in a knowledge-based economic era. In the philosophy of concurrent engineering, product development should be carried out in a concurrent way. Computer support is necessary for Concurrent Product Development (CPD). As an excellent tool to meet complex needs, CSCW has been used in CPD. But nearly all CSCW systems that have been developed so far concentrate on a more or less narrow sub-field of cooperative work. Thus, the need of integrated CSCW applications are apparent. The agent is a suitable programming paradigm that can be used to meet the complex needs. In this paper, a P-PROCE (Process, Product, Resource, Organization, Control & Evaluation) model is introduced for CPD firstly. By categorizing the agents of the multi-agent system (MAS) into different types of agent according to P-PROCE model and offering a structure of MAS, the CPD is mapped to MAS. The cooperation among agents is very important for MAS. In the paper, a two-layer cooperation structure of MAS is proposed. In the macro layer, agent based workflow control the CPD process and in the micro layer the entity agents interact with each other directly to fulfill the task. The key issues of these two cooperation layers are discussed in the paper. Component based structure of agent and an implemented case are also provided in the paper.