Mediating Conflict in Concurrent Engineering with a Protocol Based on Utility

Abstract

Concurrent engineering is an approach to product, process, and organizational design in which experts from many disciplines contnbute at many stages of the product life cycle Even though the design process is mostly cooperative, conflicts among sharply diverging viewpoints may occur, which require negotiated compromise solutions Design advice tools can assist in the process of negotiation by making their critiques and suggestions conveniently available to all members of the product development team Constraint-based languages of sufficient expressive power provide a convenient representation of real-world problems like those encountered in concurrent engineering, and we believe they are a good basis for building such design advice tools In this paper we descnbe a protocol, based on the use of economic utility, by which constraint-based design advice systems can recognize conflict, and support and mediate negotiation fairly

Keywords

teaming and sharing reasoning and negotiation collaborative decision making

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