Agent-based Partner Selection and Simulation in Collaborative Product Development Process

Collaborative Product Development (CPD) process is characterized by autonomous task control, dynamic task sequence, and frequent team collaboration, which endow the process with high flexibility and uncertainty. In the CPD process, designers are the one of the important elements with prominent characteristics of autonomy, collaboration and initiative, the process is knowledge-based simultaneously. Therefore, partner selection is essential problem. Aimed the problem, a multi-agent negotiation-arbitration framework of partner selection is proposed firstly; secondly, partner selection process and rules based on the framework are given; thirdly, 3 optimal strategies for conflict resolution are approached, including suboptimization strategy, waiting strategy and utility strategy; lastly, various contrastive experiments are carried for some CPD process based on the former simulation platform by add new functions. The simulation results show that the selection rules and conflict resolution strategies can shorten project duration on the basis of quantitative analysis; it indicates that the method of agent-based simulation is a valid way to improve the efficiency of process management.