what-when-how
In Depth Tutorials and Information
Based on the evaluation results, a most preferred argument (i.e., the one with high-
est evaluation score) will be recommended as the final agreement of the negotiation
for the design task. hey will move back to Step 3 in Section 8.3.4.1.3 to check for
further decision conlicts with other tasks. hese iterations continue until no more
conflict is found (i.e., no more negotiation is necessary), and the team moves to the
post-negotiation phase as described in the coming text.
8.3.4.6 Post-Negotiation: Consensual Agreement
and Move to Next Phase
In the post-negotiation phase, the stakeholders have achieved consensual agree-
ment for the design process: they have completed all negotiation activities and are
committed to accept one jointly-agreed design that consists of agreements for each
design task. he step in this last phase is described in the coming text.
8.3.4.6.1 Step 8—Obtain a Commonly Accepted Design
At the end of the collaborative negotiation process for each task, the design team
should either agree on a commonly appraised argument, or take the evaluation
results and accept the argument with the top evaluation score as the agreement.
After this process runs for all the design tasks, the team should be ready to con-
tinue to the next phase of the engineering design process with the implementa-
tion proposals in the agreed arguments for all the tasks. In addition, the result of
the collaborative negotiation processes also includes the objectives and perspec-
tives which have been collected and constructed in the negotiation phase and can
be very useful for future collaboration within the same group of stakeholders on
similar design tasks.
8.4 PrototypeImplementation
andSystemApplications
Using the sociotechnical collaborative negotiation approach presented in the previ-
ous section, in this work we are developing an Intelligent Web-Based Argument
Negotiation Toolkit (IWANT). IWANT is a computer-supported collaborative
negotiation management system based on our approach for group decision in engi-
neering design processes. he unique contribution of this system is in its manage-
ment of a negotiation process based on structured argument that is built upon the
synthesis of a value-focused objective hierarchy and the generic argument struc-
ture. It provides a toolkit to help the stakeholders to systematically carry out a
collaborative negotiation process for group decision in engineering design and also
help us justify our research approach in improving the effectiveness of collaborative
