Holonic multi-agent system for modeling complexity structures of Product Development Process

Today's the increasing globalization of the worldwide market and diverse technological advancements is forcing hard competition. Consequently, satisfying customers force firms to develop product and to look into all the possible areas of improvement in the product development process (PDP). The early research on PDP has produced models that view the process as a linear system with sequential and discrete stages. Over the time and with the increased complexity, PDP became hard to imagine out of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) strategy. Hence, within the dynamic environment, managing a PDP is a challenging mission. In fact, uncertainty, variety, diversity, distributive control, interconnected entities are some of the factors that lead to the variation between expected and actual flows in PDP. Several disciplines have adopted the perspective of the Complex Adaptive System (CAS) as a viable alternative to an existing enterprise system to deal with such complexity. In this perspective, the present paper extends the linear, recursive and chaotic framework by considering PDP as a CAS. In addition, with using the complexity theory and especially an agent organizational methodology, the knowledge gained from this framework can be beneficial for PDP to move from isolated field to dynamic and holistic one.