FORM-BASED APPROACH TO DISTRIBUTED COOPERATIVE WORK

This thesis develops an object-oriented form-based multiagent model to facilitate the rapid construction of integrated systems for distributed cooperative work. The model consists of autonomous asynchronous event-driven user agents managing private formbases and interacting with each other through form interchange. A high degree of abstraction is achieved by unifying the visual appearance, storage, processing and communication behavior of forms through a generalized form metaclass. As a central contribution, the thesis solves the integration of form classes among cooperating agents locally by means of a special inheritance scheme which allows flexible management of both the private and shared form classes. The conceptual model is implemented as a generic user agent called PAGES (Programmable Agents for Group Interaction Systems). PAGES is used to construct a system called CHAMADE (Change Management in Distributed Environment) which supports the integrated coordination of the formal and informal collaboration on order amendments between salesmen, designers and engineers along the supply chain in distributed manufacture of one-of-a-kind elevators. CHAMADE shows that the underlying object-oriented form abstraction facilitates rapid construction of applications which are impossible, or at least impractical, to implement with more conventional tools. In addition, it shows that the throughput time of group tasks, e.g. change negotiations, can be significantly reduced when using these applications. The expected gross impact of faster group tasks is a shorter overall throughput time of elevators along the supply chain.