Role Perspectives in the Context of Resource Management of Product Development

Resource assignment plays a key role in the context of resource management of product development. Until recently the major share of the attention of researchers in product development area has stayed at process perspectives. The resource perspectives are neglected in some extent. Thus, this paper focuses on one of the key factors of resource management in product development process, and this factor is role assignment. Thus, we propose a complete role assignment concept model, called PD-RACM, for the resource management of product development. The model contains six basic elements (capability, resource, role, activity, permission, constraint), and the corresponding relations between the elements. PD-RACM is a comprehensive model which integrates RBAC (role-based access control) technology into traditional role-based resource assignment model. Meanwhile, the model provides enough flexibility for resource assignment. At last, we propose two types of role matching - atom matching and collection matching, which provide the foundation of further applications in resource management of product development.