CONCENSUS: multi-party negotiation support for conflict resolution in concurrent engineering design

摘要

Advances in telematics have led many manufacturing companies in particular to explore the adoption of groupware technology to improve communication between team members. However, complex activities such as conflict resolution are stillpredominantly facilitated through face-to-face negotiation meetings. Intelligent software agents technology is being applied to support computer-mediated conflict resolution activities, such as information search and retrieval, recording negotiationprocess history and task allocation whilst the creative negotiation activities such as generating new solutions, preventing and detecting conflicts are still left to the human experts. This paper describes the development of a framework for the supportof multi-party negotiation for multi-agent systems, which will be introduced through a general overview of the requirements of multi-agent negotiation. Finally, the current architecture of the developed prototype for a CONCurrent Engineering NegotiationSUpport System (CONCENSUS) is presented.