what-when-how
In Depth Tutorials and Information
the claims. herefore, all stakeholders' perspectives are generally relatively easy to
be observed by others through examination of the ground and warrants that the
stakeholder expresses [Janssen and Sage 1996]. As mentioned earlier in this section,
argument structure has been used to build an argument-based negotiation process
model in many studies, including the collaborative design previously mentioned
and proved to facilitate more objective and fair communication [Chang et al. 1995,
Sillince et al. 1999, Parsons, Sierra, and Jennings 1998, Amgoud et al. 2000, Avery
et al. 2001, Kraus 2001, Rong et al. 2002]. However, this generic structure is still
more intended for checking and arranging arguments for overlooked laws [Houp,
Pearsall, and Tebeaux 1998] instead of directly providing support for collabora-
tive negotiation of group decision in engineering design, such as organizing and
integrating stakeholders' objectives and preferences in a well-defined structure
for cross-disciplinary, distributed, and asynchronous decision makers. Also, this
generic structure and the existing negotiation approaches that were built based on
this structure often informally define the utilization of structured arguments and
loosely specify how arguments relate to other arguments with little guidance as how
best to evaluate them [Zeleznikow 2002]. herefore, one of the critical challenges
to structure arguments to support collaborative negotiation of group decision in
engineering design is to structure arguments with organized objectives and per-
spectives, to develop models that utilize these structured arguments, and to analyze
the well-shared perspectives to understand the arguments' relationship and resolve
decision conflict for carrying out effective collaborative negotiation.
Our approach has proposed a synthesis between the collaborative negotiation
process presented in the last section and this structure to organize the critical infor-
mation for negotiation based on both social and technical factors. On the techni-
cal side, the baseline design tasks model the stakeholders' decisions for the design
tasks (i.e., design task proposals) and objective hierarchy helps stakeholders share
their understanding of the design tasks in terms of objectives. On the social side,
the objective hierarchy helps the stakeholders declare their perspectives on each
design task proposals based on how well these proposals achieve the objectives.
hese perspectives have a great impact on the technical decisions and represent the
characteristics of social interaction among the stakeholders. Figure 8.5 describes a
synthesis between the data low in the collaborative negotiation and the argument
structure. As shown in the figure, the technical factors in the collaborative negotia-
tion process provide the argument structure with the major elements (e.g., claim,
warrant, and data) in the argument data structure. he social factors correspond to
the secondary argument elements (e.g., backing, qualifier, and rebuttal).
As shown in Figure 8.5, the claim is proposed by the stakeholder and consists
of a sequence of actions/objects to implement the task. he data speciies the cur-
rent state of team agreement about the design process (e.g., tasks, objectives), and
such agreement can be accomplished by previous tasks and arguments. his state
of agreement actually describes the initial state of the task and therefore provides
