Yee-Wai Sim

The Development of an Agent-Based Modeling Framework for Simulating Engineering Team Work

Team working is becoming increasingly important in modern organizations due to its beneficial outcomes. A teams 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 teams 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 models 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 models practical applications as a tool for facilitating organizational decision making with respect to optimizing team working.

An e-learning systems engineering methodology

A methodology for e-learning systems engineering is offered for use in the development of e-learning materials. The methodology draws upon the practices of software engineering to identify the key stages and steps required for the development of effective e-learning materials.

Modelling the learning transaction

A model of learning transactions is offered for use in the development of e-learning materials and toolkits. The model identifies the key components required for effective learning, and in doing so, helps the development team ensure the provision of these components to the teacher or learner.

Evaluation of an Approach to Expertise Finding

This paper presents an approach to locating an expert through the use of existing organizational information. This approach was realised through an Expert Finder framework developed by the authors. The framework enables the relationships of heterogeneous information sources to experts to be factored in to the modelling of an individuals’ expertise. The framework also provides an architecture that can be easily adapted to different organizations. The framework has been applied to a real world application and been evaluated using the notions of precision and recall.

A review of the benefits of using hypermedia manuals

The acceptance of a hypermedia system to support maintenance applications is to a large extent dependant on the ability to convince management that the system will prove beneficial. This paper reviews the assessment criteria used by a number of authors, with the objective of providing a common set of criteria that can be applied to very large industrial applications.

Open hypermedia for product support

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 hypermedia also permits just-in-time support in the most appropriate format for all users. Our approach is illustrated by the discussion of a case study in which an open hypermedia system delivers maintenance and process information to factory-floor users to support the maintenance and operation of a very large manufacturing cell.

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.