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Mixed quantitative/qualitative method for evaluating compromise solutions to conflicts in collaborative design

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2009

Dennis Bahler ,
Catherine Dupont  and
James Bowen
Dennis Bahler
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-8206, U.S.A.
Catherine Dupont
Affiliation:
Bell Northern Research, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, U.S.A.
James Bowen
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, National University of Ireland, Cork, Ireland
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Abstract

Conflicts are likely to arise among participants in a collaborative design process as the inevitable outgrowth of the differing perspectives and viewpoints involved. The opportunities for conflict are magnified if many perspectives are brought to bear on a common artifact early in the design process, as in concurrent engineering or integrated engineering. Design advice tools can assist in the process of resolving these conflicts by making critiques and suggestions conveniently available to design participants, and by offering a fair means of evaluating and comparing suggested alternatives for compromise solution. In previous work we introduced a protocol based on notions of economic utility by which design advice systems can recognize conflict and mediate negotiation fairly. This protocol allowed design teams to express the desire to maximize or minimize the values of design parameters over totally ordered bounded domains of values, such as real numeric intervals. In this paper we extend this approach by allowing expressed preferences of design teams to be qualitative as well as quantitative, by allowing teams to express interest in parameters before they actually come into existence, and by relaxing many other of the earlier restrictions on the ways teams may express their preferences.

Keywords

NegotiationConcurrent EngineeringUtilityDesign ConstraintsDesign Advice Systems
Type
Articles
Information
AI EDAM , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , September 1995 , pp. 325 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

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