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negotiation of group decision in engineering design. Based on this framework, this
work has developed a research approach that utilizes these structured arguments to
carry out effective collaborative negotiation and analyze stakeholders' perspectives
for decision conflict resolution. With this approach, stakeholders can be guided
through a systematic negotiation process where structure arguments are generated
from stakeholders' objectives and preferences. here is an exchange that helps stake-
holders share their arguments based on the logic low of argument components, and
these are evaluated to choose a most preferred argument based on how well the
objectives have been achieved.
We start with a review of a variety of disciplines that have contributed to group
decision, conflict resolution, and a discussion about the contributions and limita-
tions of the approaches in each discipline. In addition, we have reviewed our previous
work in collaborative negotiation: an engineering collaboration via the negotiation
paradigm, a sociotechnical framework, and a sociotechnical co-construction process.
hese works have built research foundations and provided operational guidance to
devise a collaborative negotiation process for the engineering design team. Based
on the summary of all the above studies, we have developed and hereby presented a
sociotechnical collaboration negotiation approach based on structured arguments.
he main strength of this approach is a collaborative negotiation process with clearly
speciied phases and steps for stakeholders to carry out negotiation activities. he
framework of grounding the structure arguments is built upon a synthesis between
the collaborative negotiation process and a generic argument structure. his syn-
thesis explains how stakeholders can generate the structured arguments accord-
ing to their objectives and preferences. With this synthesis framework it helps us
to overcome the challenges in existing practices of generic argument structure by
incorporating the important decision-making factors from both social and techni-
cal aspects and developing feasible ways to evaluate the arguments for the most
preferred by the team. Based on this synthesis, we further discuss the details of the
collaborative negotiation process where the structured arguments can be generated,
exchanged, and evaluated. In addition, this paper described a research software pro-
totype IWANT that is being developed to validate the proposed work and evaluated
in several real-life engineering projects. It has been used to collect experimental data
and user feedback both of which are used to demonstrate the application of our
approach and validate its effectiveness in supporting collaborative negotiation.
In conclusion, this research is expected to provide a more comprehensive yet
practical method for engineering design teams to effectively carry out collabora-
tive negotiation and develop a shared decision for the design tasks. We also wish to
transfer the lessons learned to other specific fields of engineering designs, such as
new product developments, to broaden the research impacts. Our future research
work will develop more objective hierarchy templates based on individual domain
and build more accurate and comprehensive models to quantify stakeholders' per-
spectives. Furthermore, we plan to thoroughly validate this research framework
and exercise the software prototype by conducting more case studies with the
