Agent-Based Project Management

Integrated project management means that design and construction planning are interleaved with plan execution, allowing both the design and plan to be changed as necessary. This requires that the right effects of change need to be propagated through the plan and design. When this is distributed among designers and planners, no one may have all of the information to perform such propagation and it is important to identify what effects should be propagated to whom, and when. We describe a set of dependencies among plan and design elements that allow such notification by a set of message-passing software agents. The result is to provide a novel level of computer support for complex projects.