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Collaborative negotiation and conflict resolution have been well-researched
areas for the past several decades. Although they have been examined from
several perspectives including social science, economics, decision theory, engi-
neering design, and artificial intelligence [Nash 1950, Keeney and Raiffa 1976,
Raiffa 1982, Davis and Smith 1983, Sycara 1991, Bui 1987, Shakun 1992], it
is only recently that frameworks for supporting collaborative negotiation and
conflict resolution have emerged [Kersten 1985, Durfee and Lesser 1989, Hunks
and Gasser 1989, Jelassi and Foroughi 1989, Kersten et al., 1991, Sycara 1989,
Lim and Benbasat 1991, Bui 1993, Bui 1994]. Although these works have devel-
oped some theoretical approaches and systematic methods to support collabora-
tive negotiation and conflict resolution in general, when facing the challenges of
group decision-making processes in modern engineering design, none of them
have either built theoretical foundations or provided practical guideline to iden-
tify and organize the objectives and preferences from decision makers and struc-
ture the negotiation arguments based on the technical propositions and these
organized objectives and perspectives in order to carry out an effective collab-
orative negotiation process in the virtual space. A new framework for ground-
ing these structured arguments must be established via a thorough study of the
existing work and deep knowledge of real-life decision-making activities. Based
on this framework, we can develop systematic models to utilize these structure
arguments to support effective collaborative negotiation.
Specifically, this paper presents a sociotechnical collaboration negotiation
approach to help an engineering design team structure their negotiation argument
with both social and technical factors and guide them through an operational and
systematic process where their arguments can be generated, exchanged, the and
evaluated. his approach helps stakeholders reconcile design conlicts by analyzing
their perspectives and the evolution of these perspectives in social interaction, and
then recommending potential conflict management strategies, such as rearranging
the design team or reining their proposals and/or objectives. his paper also pres-
ents the design, implementation, and application of a computer supported negotia-
tion system that is being developed based on the negotiation approach presented
here to support real-life engineering design collaboration.
he rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 8.2 reviews the literatures
relevant to this research work and discusses several underlying theoretical back-
grounds for the proposed approach. he overall sociotechnical collaborative nego-
tiation approach is presented in Section 8.3. It describes the integration between a
sociotechnical co-construction process and a generic argument structure to build
a negotiation approach for engineering design. he section explains how the design
arguments are generated, exchanged, and evaluated. It also illustrates how we ana-
lyze stakeholders' perspectives and their evolution in order to resolve the design
conflicts. Section 8.4 presents the architecture and functionalities of a software pro-
totype, called IWANT, which implements, and demonstrates the application of,
the proposed approach. As well, some ongoing case studies and empirical results are
