Agent-based project team collaboration behavior simulation

Abstract

This study is aimed at modeling the efficiency of collaboration behaviors of project team members, and then developing a simulator to link real project information to the addressed model, so that we can realize the possible cooperation results of a project team by experimental observations. To this end, the social network philosophy is adopted to create the team member interaction mechanism, and the agent-based modeling and simulation methodology is applied to develop the virtual team with software agents. The Project Team Collaboration Efficiency Simulator (PTCES) is implemented. Using PTCES, the communication work (CW) time, rework (RW) time, and the original planed work (PW) time spent by team members with their communication social network can be computed so that both the single activity efficiency and the whole process efficiency can also be evaluated. With a real case study of building construction project, the soundness of the PTCES is validated. Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis is completed to illustrate that actors' willing to communicate is the critical factor to collaboration efficiency, and the experiments show that 27% delay would be resulted from the structural hole in the communication social network.