Agent-based workflow management in collaborative product development on the Internet

Product development is collaborative, involving multi-disciplinary functions and heterogeneous tools. Teamwork is essential through seamless tool integration and better co-ordination of human activities. This paper proposes to use workflow management as a mechanism to facilitate the teamwork in a collaborative product development environment where remote Web-based Decision Support Systems (TeleDSS) are extensively used by team members who are geographically distributed. The workflow of a project is modelled as a network. Its nodes correspond to the work (packages), and its edges to flows of control and data. The concept of agents is introduced to define nodes and the concept of messages to define edges. As a sandwich layer, agents act as special-purpose application clients for the remote TeleDSS application servers. Agents are delegated to manipulate the corresponding TeleDSS on behalf of their human users. Details of the proceedings are recorded by agents as their properties for future references or shared uses by other team members. Through flow messages, agents are able to share input and output data and request for remote services. One of the major contributions is that agents, once defined, can be reused for different projects without any changes. q 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.