- Dennis Bahler, C. Dupont, and J. Bowen,
A Mixed Quantitative/Qualitative Method for
Evaluating Compromise Solutions to Conflicts in Collaborative Design,
Journal of Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis
and Manufacturing, 9(4),
Special Issue on Conflict Management in Design, 1995,
325-336.
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.
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