The Procura Model and Agents

Procura is a Project Management model which allows the planning and scheduling of agent based design projects in a hierarchical top-down approach. Since the information which is available while the top-level planning and scheduling is done is usually incomplete, the decisions made at this level will often need to be revised as soon as more information becomes available, and conditions change. Procura facilitates the necessary replanning, making use of Redux', a design support tool which can keep track of decisions, rejection of decisions, and their rationales. In the Procura model, Redux' tracks planning and scheduling decisions as well as the actual design decisions, thereby integrating planning, scheduling and design, and supporting a notification system which keeps all involved agents (designers as well as scheduling agents) informed about occurring changes.

The Redux terms can be see as a full graph or in differerent views. Goals and Decision Inputs can be abstracted into a project view in which goals are tasks and decision inputs are task input/outputs.

The key insight of Procura is that project planning is a kind of design. Thus project management can be seen as process design. Redux' is for managing the design process. Project management/process design then becomes a design process itself that can be managed by Redux', with some specialization of the model for project management.

The interesting case is when a project is to design an artifact. The Redux model can then be used to interrelate the design and development of the artifact and the design of the process for design. The Procura model is intended to create a very flexible and dynamic way of managing the impact of changes in the artifact design on the process design and also the reverse. Project management and artifact design are then seen as always incomplent and interdependent.

Procura extends Redux by specializing Goal into Scheduling Goals and Planning Tasks. Redux' itslef already recognizes a special Feature consisting of the keyword Assign-Agent. This can be used to assign an agent to a task and results in a notification to the assigned agent. The full model is given in the Procura paper. Procura has strong relationships to the CoMo-Kit project.

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