Ontology-based intelligent decision support agent for CMMI project monitoring and control

This paper presents an ontology-based intelligent decision support agent (OIDSA) to apply to project monitoring and control of capability maturity model integration (CMMI). The OIDSA is composed of a natural language processing agent, a fuzzy inference agent, and a performance decision support agent. All the needed information of the OIDSA, including the CMMI ontology and the project personal ontology, is stored in an ontology repository. In addition, the natural language processing agent, based on the Chinese Dictionary, periodically collects the information of the project progress from project members to analyze the features of the Chinese terms for semantic concept clustering. Next, the fuzzy inference agent computes the similarity of the planned progress report and actual progress report, based on the CMMI ontology, the project personal ontology, and natural language processing results. Finally, the performance decision support agent measures the completed percentage of the progress for each project member. The results provided by the OIDSA are sent to the project manager for evaluating the performance of each project member. The experimental results show that the OIDSA can work effectively for project monitoring and control of CMMI. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.