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Team working is becoming increasingly important in modern organizations due to its beneficial outcomes. A team's performance levels are determined by complex interactions between the attributes of its individual members, the communication and dynamics between members, the working environment, and the team's work tasks. As organizations evolve, so too does the nature of team working. During the past two decades, product development in engineering organizations has increasingly been undertaken by multidisciplinary integrated product teams. Such increasing complexity means that the nature of research methods for studying teams must also evolve. Accordingly, this paper proposes an agent-based modeling approach for simulating team working within an engineering environment, informed by research conducted in two engineering organizations. The model includes a number of variables at an individual level (competency, motivation, availability, response rate), team level (communication, shared mental models, trust), and task level (difficulty, workflow), which jointly determine team performance (quality, time to complete the task, time spent working on the task). In addition to describing the model's development, the paper also reports the results of various simulation runs that were conducted in response to realistic team working scenarios, together with its validation. Finally, the paper discusses the model's practical applications as a tool for facilitating organizational decision making with respect to optimizing team working.

As industrial systems become increasingly more complex, the maintenance and operating information increases both in volume and complexity. With the current pressures on manufacturing, the management of information resources has become a critical issue. In particular, ensuring that personnel can access current information quickly and effectively when undertaking a specific task. This paper discusses some of the issues involved in, and the benefits of using, open hypermedia to manage and deliver a diverse range of information. While the paper concentrates on the problems specifically associated with manufacturing organizations, the problems are generic across other business sectors, such as healthcare, defence and finance. The open hypermedia approach to information management and delivery allows a multimedia resource base to be used for a range of applications and it permits a user to have controlled access to the required information in an easily accessible and structured manner. Recent advancement in hyp...

The interactions between individual designers, within integrated product teams, and the nature of design tasks, all have a significant impact upon how well a design task can be performed, and hence the quality of the resultant product and the time in which it can be delivered. In this paper we describe an ongoing research project which aims to model integrated product teams through the use of multi-agent systems. We first describe the background and rationale for our work, and then present our initial computational model and results from the simulation of an integrated product team. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the model will evolve to improve the accuracy of the simulation.

This paper considers an agent-based approach to organizational modeling within the engineering design domain. It is widely recognized that interactions between individual designers, between (and within) integrated product teams (IPTs), together with the nature of design tasks have a significant impact upon how well a task can be performed, and hence the quality of the resultant product. In order for organizations to gain a full understanding of design team interactions within IPTs, we propose the use of multi-agent systems to model the behaviors and cognitions of team members, and to explore the applicability of different agent-theoretic approaches that could augment current team practices. In this paper we discuss the background to the work and the identifications of individual, and team variables. The paper concludes by discussing the computational model of a small IPT, which has been implemented using JADE, and the initial results are presented.