what-when-how
In Depth Tutorials and Information
described. Lastly, Section 8.5 summarizes this presented research and outlines our
planned future work.
8.2 ReviewsofRelatedStudies
As mentioned in Section 8.1, the engineering design is a collaborative negotia-
tion process between various departments which have to socially interact and make
technical decisions for engineering design tasks. his process is involved with
multiple stakeholders who are geographically distributed, cross-disciplinary, and
asynchronously communicating. Our challenge is to identify and organize these
stakeholders' objectives and perspectives, and then structure their arguments with
this organized information in order to support their group decisions and resolve the
decision conflicts through the collaborative negotiation process. To put the discus-
sion in perspective, this section reviews a variety of disciplines in relations to group
decision and conflict resolution. Our previous work in collaborative negotiation is
also discussed in this section.
8.2.1 Group Decision Studies
Decision scientists interested in group decisions have investigated various negotia-
tion models and decision analysis functionalities that help to achieve group con-
sensus among multiple interests and competing positions of stakeholders. However,
these models and functionalities have not provided full support to decision mak-
ers who have to identify, organize, and integrate their multidisciplinary objectives
and perspectives from distributed locations and asynchronous communications.
he schools of study in this field include game-theoretic analysis [Rosenschein and
Zlotkin 1994, Kraus 2001, Sandholm 2002a]; heuristic-based approaches [Faratin
2000, Kowalczyk and Bui 2001, Fatima et al. 2002, Kraus 2001, Klein 1995];
and argumentation-based approaches [Kraus et al. 1998; Parsons et al. 1998; Sierra
et al. 1998]. he details of each study in relations to our work are explained below.
Rooted in economics, game theory studies interactions between self-interested
agents. he objective of game theory is to determine the best (i.e., most rational)
decision a player can make, using mathematical modeling. In order to do so, the
player must take into account the decisions that other agents can make and must
assume that they will act rationally as well. A solution in game theory is gener-
ally found when players' strategies are in equilibrium: a player's strategy is the
best response to the others' strategies. Tools from game theory can help decision
makers understand and predict the outcome of a negotiation and then help them
make strategic decisions in group decision-making process [Nagarajan and Sosic
2008]. Game theory can be divided into two main approaches. Noncooperative
game theory is strategy oriented, meaning it studies what players will do in a spe-
cific context in order to win over their opponent. In contrast, cooperative game
