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design, collaborative design has some intrinsic characteristics. he objectives of
design are not homogeneous since various persons join the design team and make
group decisions on design proposals based on their own objectives and various
perspectives. Organizing their objectives and integrating their perspectives is a
key challenge for the engineers who collaborate with each other on technical tasks
and in social interactions to make rational group decisions in engineering design.
Compounded with the temporal and geographical differences, this becomes an
even stronger challenge that needs to be confronted by the whole engineering
research community. However, despite its importance, the current investigation
of the features and characteristics of group decisions in collaborative engineering
design is more limited to practiced heuristics rather than scientific principles with
solid theoretical foundation. In order to establish an adequate framework to sup-
port such group decision making, it is necessary to thoroughly investigate the real-
life group decision-making practices in engineering design and also study different
schools of studies that contribute to this topic.
In real-life engineering design processes, engineers always need to negotiate
with each other in order to reach agreement when they have conflicting opinions
and competing demands. he ability to negotiate with multiple stakeholders who
have different technical expertise and diverse social backgrounds (e.g., many other
nontechnical factors) is just as important as the ability to analyze design parameters
and build system modules in engineering design. his ability is the key to making
a rational group decision in light of different objectives, criteria, and perspectives.
he process through which rational decision are jointly made in collaborative engi-
neering design is indeed a collaborative negotiation process. Traditionally, nego-
tiation has been considered in a distributive context where the goals, values, and
interests of the parties are in conflict [Sycara 1990]. However, there are many situ-
ations where integrative types of negotiation occur. In these situations, the parties
have to collaboratively engage in a group problem-solving process characterized
by increased cooperativeness and consensus seeking through information sharing
and restructuring [Shakun 1988]. Engineering design is an example of such a col-
laborative negotiation process. It exemplifies situations that admit conflict needing
negotiation. In other words, although the overall situation is collaborative, conflict
might arise on proposing technical solutions to achieve objectives, set up evalu-
ation criteria, integrating perspectives which choosing between, and agree upon
proposals. Such situations are very common in engineering teams where, although
team members have common high-level goals for the entire design process they
are engaged in, conflicts also frequently arise for a specific design task. In order to
effectively resolve these conflicts, especially in group decision making in a distrib-
uted and asynchronous workspace such as modern engineering design, one of the
critical requirements is to structure the negotiation arguments from multiple deci-
sion makers based on their objectives and perspectives, in order to make sure that
all stakeholders have a common ground for negotiation and can effectively make
group decisions through the negotiation process.
