Dynamic Project Management:A Principal - Agent Based Approach

摘要

Project management is a critical aspect for the development of new products and systems. Today’s productrndevelopment environment requires collaboration and coordination with experts from different technical backgroundsrnwho possess different utilities and preferences in their working patterns. Given this situation, project managementrnencompasses much more than just a sequence of executable steps. It is with assumptions of profit maximization thatrnthe process and behaviors of participants in a project are motivated. Traditional project management approaches dornnot consider the dynamic nature and varying behaviors of project participants. Rather, most emphasis is on therneffect of changes in profit through planning and design activities only. This paper presents a dynamic projectrnmanagement approach by constructing a principal-agent based model with modifiable constraint and analyzing itsrneffect on the agent’s incentives. In addition, an agent-based simulation modeling approach is adopted to calculaternthe cumulative profit variation caused by such a modification. This agent-based model of project management willrnbe utilized to test the different strategies that can be enforced to remove the situation of asymmetric informationrnamong the project management players resulting in increased cumulative profit. Different experimental conditionsrnwill be implemented using a Java based simulation platform “RePast”.