Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation of Product Development Teams

Abstract

The success of product development highly depends on the quality of cooperation among members of a team involved in the process. Thus, a tool capable of simulating product development team may be beneficial for researchers interested in teamwork, as well as useful for managers struggling with team formation during process planning phase. This work aims at providing a detailed overview of agent-based simulators of product development teams. Specifically, the scientific databases Web of Science, Scopus, ACM DL, and IEEE were searched to extract relevant agent-based models of teamwork in mechanical engineering and aerospace context and obtained models were reviewed to identify their key advantages and limitations.

Agent-Based Modelling: Parallel and Distributed Simulation of Product Development Team

“…Perišić et al [3] surveyed agent-based models of product development teams. Some of these models will be mentioned and some models that appeared after that article.…”

“…Some models were only theoretical or mathematical and not oriented on agent-based simulation on a computer. The survey [3], references and citations additionally extended this set. In the end, 28 models which satisfied the criteria were chosen.…”

“…Computer simulation of these systems may be very demanding in terms of time and memory. Some articles have already surveyed different types of existing models of product development [3,4], but none of them focuses on processes with a large number of developers to our knowledge. This work focuses on agentbased models consisting of a large number of agents and describes some tools and computational aspects of simulation performance for such models.…”

Proposal of a Decision Support System and Model to Mitigate Scope Variability for New Product Development

“…Hence, there has to be an idea-sorting methodology to properly categorize ideas clearly and concisely to produce better results (Gerlach & Brem, 2017). Systems such as Agent-based (Perišić et al, 2018), Case-based (Grosskopf et al, 2015), and Bayesian models (Ma, 2019) were not considered to be used for the proposed consolidated DSM. This is because they are not appropriate for this situation as they are too complicated, provide information that is difficult to implement, and are unable to address the issues commonly faced by PM in MNC doing research for engineering NPD when mitigating scope variability.…”

“…This is because they are not appropriate for this situation as they are too complicated, provide information that is difficult to implement, and are unable to address the issues commonly faced by PM in MNC doing research for engineering NPD when mitigating scope variability. Based on the literature studied (Grosskopf et al, 2015;Ma, 2019;Perišić et al, 2018) these models are also likely to bring about an overload of information compared to the current scope of DSM currently studied as there would be too many variables to consider. Information overload would run against the purpose of this research which is to mitigate scope variability to allow PM to focus on only a few key factors that would affect NPD the most.…”