Modeling and Simulation Study of Two-Phase Collaborative Behaviors Oriented to Open Source Design Process

Abstract

Open source design (OSD) is an emerging cluster design mode based on Internet, and it takes full advantage of knowledge, technology, and resources among designers to promote product development. In this mode, designers’ behaviors of collaboration have important influence on product development process. In this paper, firstly collaboration flow including two types of collaboration relations between designers in open source design is depicted. Secondly, two-phase collaborative behavior model including partner selection and response is built by means of utility functions. At last, simulation experiment including 4 scenarios is designed based on open source project of mobile phone and conducted by multiagent simulation, and contrastive analysis is carried out to study collaboration behaviors’ impact on open source design process. The results show that the two-phase collaborative behavior model elaborately describes structure evolution of Open Source Community (OSC) as well as designers’ collaboration behaviors and that different ways of partner selection behaviors have significant impact on the evolution of OSD process as well as OSC structure. Furthermore, the results suggest that designers should better consider more the factor of matching degree between designers but less collaboration record.