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in group decisions is to identify, organize, and integrate the competing objectives
and varying perspectives from the distributed, cross-disciplinary, and asynchro-
nous stakeholders. Existing approaches of supporting group decision cannot satisfy
these challenges posed by modern engineering design. To address the challenge of
supporting collaborative negotiation for group decision making in a distributed
and asynchronous workspace like modern engineering design, one of the critical
requirements is to structure the negotiation arguments with organized objectives
and perspectives from the stakeholders, in order to making sure that all stakeholders
have a common ground for achieving mutual understanding and making rational
group decisions for engineering design process. With the well-shared information,
we can develop specific methods to analyze stakeholders' perspectives and resolve
the conflicts caused by the differences in these perspectives.
To address the aforementioned challenges, this work proposes a sociotechni-
cal collaborative negotiation approach to support the group decisions in engineer-
ing design. his approach irst devises a collaborative negotiation process and then
synthesizes it with a generic argument structure. his synthesis entails the nego-
tiation arguments to be structured with both social characteristics (e.g., including
stakeholders' objectives and perspectives) and technical factors (e.g., design propos-
als). With this synthesis, the collaborative negotiation process specifies how the
structured arguments can be generated, exchanged, and evaluated in a system-
atic way. In this process, the stakeholders' perspectives can be analyzed to help
stakeholders obtain better understanding of each other's positions and suggest
appropriate conlict resolution strategies. he following sections deine the key ter-
minologies for this approach (in Section 3.1), give an overview of this sociotechni-
cal collaborative negotiation process (in Section 3.2), propose its synthesis with the
generic argument structure (in Section 3.3), and then (in Section 3.4) discuss the
process in greater details.
8.3.1 Definitions of Terminologies
his work focuses on managing negotiation tasks in which a team of engineers
must collaborate with each other to design an engineering solution. he subject
of collaborative negotiation in engineering design is part of an emerging research
field, called
collaborativeengineering
. In this new research field, collaborative engi-
neering is defined as a sociotechnical group decision-making process, whereby a
team of engineers collaborate to resolve conflicts, bargain for individual or collec-
tive advantages, agree upon courses of action, and/or craft joint decisions that serve
their mutual interests. Unlike traditional engineering tasks, which are often treated
as a purely technical decision-making process of “task-work” by an individual, col-
laborative engineering tasks are, additionally, a social endeavor of teamwork by a
team of individuals. In practice, collaborative engineering is best carried out in a
“team” environment where, unlike a “work group,” all team members have already
agreed on a common goal to achieve. Based on this belief, engineering design is
