Modelling project coordination in a multi-agent framework

Distributed project coordination requires insight in the types of interaction involved in engineering practice. In current practice, well-structured hierarchical management and decentralised project organisation are often combined. Within an organisation, a number of levels can be found within which responsibility for effective interaction is delegated to the engineers themselves. Engineers decide when to exchange preliminary ideas and partial designs, when to acknowledge possible conflicts and when to resolve such conflicts, when to question requirements, et cetera. A combination of traditional management structures and virtual organisations result in dynamic structures, liable to considerable change during the life span of a project. The types of interaction encountered in such real-life engineering situations show how intricate such processes can be. Within the multi-agent community the problem of distributed problem solving has been recognised; see for example (Dunskus, Grecu, Brown and Berker, 1995; Petrie, 1994). In (Jennings, 1995) an informal multi-agent model for cooperative problem solving is proposed. Essential elements of this model are the dynamic organisation and management of joint activities, susceptive to change due to unexpected events. As described, the model, however, does not provide enough detail to support analysis, modelling and implementation of design coordination systems in specific domains. To acquire a more precise description of this model more detailed analysis is required. In this paper a real-life design project is analysed for a situation in which traditional management and virtual organisations are combined: the design of part of the interior of a specific aircraft. The DESIRE framework (Langevelde, Philipsen and Treur, 1992; Brazier, Dunin-Keplicz, Jennings and Treur, 1995; Brazier, Treur, Wijngaards and Willems, 1995, 1996) is used to model the coordination of this cooperative distributed design project, using Jennings' model as a frame of reference.