Simulation of project scheduling through the rule-based coordination in indirect collaboration design

Product design has become more and more complex in recent years that requires a lot of people from different disciplines to work synergistically. Usually, a large project is necessary to be divided into various subtasks, as different designers in the collaborative team have diverse abilities for those separated subtasks. It is very important to allocate specific tasks to those who are good at them. However, the present prior task scheduling method cannot meet the requirements. Enlightened by the animal collectives, we think internal coordination can be an effective scheduling method for a large project. We presented a cellular automata (CA) model to simulate the scheduling of complicated project scheduling, defined some basic mathematical definitions by the CA method, developed the coordination rules, and presented a CA algorithm. Practical scheduling simulations of two design projects are presented. The results show that the internal coordination is possible to achieve the global scheduling. Although the oscillations exist during the coordination, the makespan could be converged quickly. After some evaluations, we found that different rules can lead to distinct scheduling results; also the proposed method is suitable for large‐scale project scheduling.