Design of protocols for task administration in collaborative e-work systems
Abstract
Design of Task Administration Protocols (TAPs) for effective task allocation and administration in collaborative production/service systems is investigated. Customer-focused and concurrent engineering service systems process tasks more effectively as a result of the power of collaboration among multiple participants. In such environments, however, complex situations might arise that require decisions that cannot be handled by simple coordination protocols (CPs). To overcome the limitation of CPs and design an effective control mechanism to manage complex situations, this research identifies basic problems in collaborative task administration and proposes the design framework of protocols to solve the problems. This research presents the theory of TAPs design and their models for control of collaborative production/service systems to handle task administration from task initialization, task allocation, task monitoring, to task completion. In the TAPs design framework, three component protocols are found to constitute TAPs and are triggered to handle many task administration contexts: 1) Task Requirement Analysis Protocol, 2) Shared Resource Allocation Protocol, and 3) Synchronization & Time-Out Protocol. Two case studies with TAPs and CPs for task allocation in collaborative production/service systems—TestLAN (local area networks of testers) and FSN (wireless sensor networks to monitor automation facilities)—are investigated to analyze the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed design methodology. Experiments are conducted to compare the performance under different TAPs and under non-TAP CPs under various load conditions. The experimental results show that under most cases studied there is significant performance improvement by TAPs over CPs, e.g., 84% vs. 64% in terms of task completion ratio for Facility Sensor Networks. The advantage of TAPs can be explained by their design with relatively higher level of collaborative intelligence, addressing more complex control logic compared with non-TAP CPs.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Nof, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Industrial engineering|Information science|Systems science
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