An Approach to Modeling Integrated Product Teams

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.