The virtual design team (VDT): a multi-agent analysis framework for designing project organizations

The virtual design team (VDT) is a multiagent modeling and simulation framework that has been developed over the past 15 years to help project managers design work processes and organizations for highly concurrent, "fast-track" project work. VDT has been extensively validated as an analysis tool for project organizations engaged in a routine - albeit complex and fast-track - product development efforts. Three important limitations of VDT are (1) it models only routine projects for which all tasks, agents, and relationships between and among them can be prespecified and held constant; (2) it assumes that all exceptions are handled hierarchically; and (3) it ignores any goal incongruency among project participants. We describe VDT, highlights its limitations, and presents ongoing research that is attempting to address these limitations.