Paper
Coordination of Distributed New Product Development Processes for Multiple Design Chains
- Authors:
- Ching-hung Tseng; Shyh-ming Lin
- Abstract
- Abstract- This study addresses the conflict problem of DNPD (Distributed New Product Development) schedules that arises among multiple design chains. A DNPD process is composed of certain parallel and sequential activities, fulfilled by a core company and some satellite companies. Companies involved in DNPD processes form a loosely coupled multiple design chains network. The design chain companies, in dynamically changing business environment, must frequently adjust their ongoing DNPD activities to meet market requirements. Any adjustment made in the multiple design chains network is likely to bring the interdependent companies into conflict. With no coordination mechanism, such kind of conflict will delay the product launch time, lead to considerable profit loss, and make the core companies lose their competitive positions. This study tries to solve the conflict problem by first adopting the congestion games model to formulate the design chain dynamic conflict problem, proposing an agent based problem solving technique to coordinate the conflict and then applying physical agents to implement a distributed coordination mechanism for the multiple design chains. To evaluate the performance of the mechanism, this study takes the simulated multiple design chains as the cases to carry out some experiments on it. The experimental results demonstrate the validity of our mechanism.
- Keywords
- Design Chain; Distributed New Product Development; Process Schedule Conflict Coordination; Congestion Games; Software Agents
- StartPage
- 132
- EndPage
- 144
- Doi