A Comparison of Agent-Based Coordination Architecture Variants for Automotive Product Change Management

Automotive companies tend to apply modular approaches in their product development processes in order to save costs and meet increasingly diversified customer demands. In largely decentralized environments with cross-branded development projects over multiple departments in different sites this modular approach leads to very complex and large data structures. Maintaining consistency and transparency, as well as coordinating information flows in such an environment is a major task which is often accomplished manually. Based on a real world case study, this paper analyzes a key development process: the connection of geometric (geometries) and logistical data (parts). During this time consuming process information carriers (geometries and parts) with independent lifecycles that are maintained by different stakeholders (designer and purchaser) of different departments (and in this scenario even within multiple brands) are linked as these carriers themselves are mutually dependent. This paper then proceeds to model five agent-based architecture variants to support this process. In addition, an algorithm to map geometric and logistical data which aims to relieve the actors involved (regarding the organizational overhead) is outlined.The paper concludes with a comparison of the different agent architecture variants and emphasizes the most promising variants to partly automate the connection of geometric and logistical data.