پورتال های پشتیبانی با عامل و مدیریت دانش در مجموعه پروژه های "تحقیق و توسعه"

This paper is concerned with organizing knowledge management in complex R&D projects where time is the prime factor. We argue that specific portals developed using groupware technology and products should be augmented by agents in order to increase the overall system reactivity and achieve the global objective, namely to save time. We describe a portal we have developed using a groupware approach, we give the structure of a system of cognitive agents, and discuss our current attempt to bring the two technologies together

Our paper analyzes the research being done in the context of a French national project for the automotive industry. The main problem to be solved is to organize knowledge management in complex high priority urgent R&D projects, so that the gained experience can be used by the following complex high priority urgent R&D projects. A similar but more general concern was expressed in the MOKA European project [1]. In order to offer possible solutions, one has to take into account the reality of the situation, and in particular organizational constraints, rather than devising elegant but impractical systems. Since we are dealing mostly with information, two technologies are useable: groupware for document management and cooperative work, and multi-agent systems (MAS) for flexibility and dynamics. The point of view taken in the paper is that of the application. The paper is organized in four parts: Section 2 introduces the context of the work; Section 3 describes the features of a portal we developed for R&D projects; Section 4 discusses the multi-agent architecture that we have developed recently; and Section 5 discusses the possibility of putting the two technologies to work together, mentioning some problems which remain to be solved.

In this paper, we discussed the problem of collecting and organizing knowledge during complex high priority R&D projects. We first developed a project portal to be given to the project members. The portal system is currently being deployed in several projects: some are industrial, some more administrative, some are research projects. In the coming months, we hope to obtain a good feedback from the users. Already, early results indicate some rigidity and lack of flexibility, compared with our experience with cognitive MAS. However, MAS alone do not offer enough robustness and security for industrial applications. Consequently, we argued that a combined approach mixing groupware and agents would present more interesting features, providing flexibility and overall more intelligent behavior. We are currently developing such an approach.While retaining some of the original features of the groupware approach, namely handling volume and providing security, agent-based portals could be made progressively more like one of the agent coterie discussed in Section 3.4. The resulting combination of artificial agents and human actors would then embody the concept of ba presented by Nonaka and Konno [2].