@article {385,
	title = {The Virtual Design Team: A Computational Model of Project Organizations},
	number = {WP043},
	year = {1996},
	month = {03/1996},
	abstract = {Large scale and multidisciplinary engineering projects (e.g., design of a hospital building) are often complex and involve many interdependent activities, and require intensive coordination among actors to deal with the activity interdependencies. To make such projects more efficient and effective, one needs to understand how coordination requirements are generated and what coordination mechanisms should be applied for a given project situation. Our research on the Virtual Design Team (VDT) attempts to develop a computational model of project organizations to analyze how activity interdependencies raise coordination needs and how organization design and introduction of communication tools may change the coordination capacity of project teams, with resulting impacts on project performance. The VDT model is built based on organizational contingency theory (Galbraith 1977) and our observations about collaborative and multidisciplinary work in large, complex projects. VDT explicitly models actors, activities, communication tools and organizations. Based on our extended information-processing view of organizations, VDT simulates the actions of, and interactions among, actors as processes of attention allocation, capacity allocation, and communication. VDT evaluates organization performance by measuring emergent project duration, direct cost, and coordination quality. The VDT model has been tested internally, and evaluated externally through case-studies. We found three way qualitative consistency among predictions of the simulation model, of organization theory, and of experienced project managers. In this paper, we present the VDT model in detail and discuss some general issues involved in computational organization modeling, including level of abstraction of tasks and actors{\textquoteright} reasoning, and model validation.},
	keywords = {Computational Organization Modeling, Coordination, Organizational Contingency Theory, Validation, VDT, Virtual Design Team},
	attachments = {http://cife.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/WP043.pdf},
	author = {Jin, Yan and Levitt, Raymond}
}
