Most design tasks involve the management of conflict. Conflict arises when contradictory requirements are imposed upon characteristics of artifacts, upon the process of their creation and/or upon their intended use. Even individual design requires trade-offs because of competing design criteria, such as functionality, safety, cost, and social acceptance. The ability of designers to avoid or minimize conflict through judicious tradeoffs, careful negotiations and other methods become their most valuable skills.

It is now becoming increasingly common for products to be designed via an interdisciplinary approach, particularly when an engineering enterprise adopts the concurrent engineering approach. Essentially, this implies that several heterogeneous sources of knowledge are simultaneously involved during the design phase of the product. The benefits often cited as a result of such an approach are increased quality and innovation, decreased time-to-market, and lower manufacturing costs. However, the approach also accentuates the problem of how to handle and manage conflicts, which frequently arise due to several factors as discussed in this paper. This paper also describes a system called Schemebuilder, which is an integrated design workbench aimed at supporting the conceptual and embodiment phases of interdisciplinary systems design, and its mechanisms for handling and resolving conflicts.

Collaborative design conflicts are an important type of process “exception,” that is, a real-life contingency such as a process change, execution error, or missed opportunity that leads to suboptimal performance of a collaborative process. This paper presents an integrated computational approach to collaborative process exception handling that avoids important weaknesses in current conflict management methods through the synergistic integration of conflict, workflow, and rationale technology. The approach is based upon an inclusive dependency language plus coordination services for dependency capture, process enactment, and exception handling. An initial implementation of this method called “iDCSS” is presented and challenges for future evolution of this technology are identified.

Pareto optimality is a domain-independent property that can be used to coordinate distributed engineering agents. Within a model of design called Redux, some aspects of dependency-directed backtracking can be interpreted as tracking Pareto optimality. These concepts are implemented in a framework, called Next-Link, that coordinates legacy engineering systems. This framework allows existing software tools to communicate with each other and a Redux agent over the Internet. The functionality is illustrated with examples from the domain of electrical cable harness design.

Integrating multiple engineering perspectives is critical to designing ever more complex products, but this introduces great potential for miscommunication leading to design conflicts. The SHADE (SHAred Dependency Engineering) project is defining agent infrastructure technology that supports dynamic, knowledge-based communication among heterogeneous engineering tools, collaboration systems, and conflict management systems. Building on technologies for defining a shared formal vocabulary and protocols for exchanging information, SHADE is developing facilitators that assist in locating and disseminating information. The result is a flexible infrastructure that helps existing engineering tools work together more effectively, and that supports a variety of new conflict management approaches. This article outlines the facilitation and application agents created by SHADE, and provides an in-depth example of their application to an engineering task.

Design Expert Systems can be built using many small, cooperating, limited function expert systems called Single Function Agents (SiFAs). Using this approach we will be able to investigate and discover primitive problem-solving and interaction patterns, specific for multiagent design systems, and should gain a deeper understanding of the types of knowledge involved. This paper presents some categories of conflicts that have been studied using the SiFA approach, and makes a brief presentation of the SINE implementation of SiFAs.

Much of preliminary engineering design is a constraint-driven non-monotonic exploration process. Initial decisions are made when information is incomplete and many goals are contradictory. Such conditions are present regardless of whether one or several designers contribute to designs. This paper presents an approach for supporting decisions in situations of incomplete and conflicting knowledge. In particular, we use assumptions and conflict management to achieve efficient search in contexts where little reliable information exists. A knowledge representation, containing a semantic differentiation between two types of assumptions, is used within a computational model based on the dynamic constraint satisfaction paradigm. Conflict management strategies consist of three generic mechanisms adapted to the type of constraints involved. These strategies may be refined through consideration of variable importance, context, and design inertia.

Conflicts are likely to arise among participants in a collaborative design process as the inevitable outgrowth of the differing perspectives and viewpoints involved. The opportunities for conflict are magnified if many perspectives are brought to bear on a common artifact early in the design process, as in concurrent engineering or integrated engineering. Design advice tools can assist in the process of resolving these conflicts by making critiques and suggestions conveniently available to design participants, and by offering a fair means of evaluating and comparing suggested alternatives for compromise solution. In previous work we introduced a protocol based on notions of economic utility by which design advice systems can recognize conflict and mediate negotiation fairly. This protocol allowed design teams to express the desire to maximize or minimize the values of design parameters over totally ordered bounded domains of values, such as real numeric intervals. In this paper we extend this approach by allowing expressed preferences of design teams to be qualitative as well as quantitative, by allowing teams to express interest in parameters before they actually come into existence, and by relaxing many other of the earlier restrictions on the ways teams may express their preferences.

This article presents our approach for conflict management in our knowledge acquisition tool KATEMES, aimed at tackling multiple experts. We offer a method for helping the knowledge engineer to detect expertise conflicts in the framework of the KADS knowledge acquisition method. We also propose techniques for conflict management through comparison of knowledge graphs.

This paper focusses on how conflicts that arise during a design process and the management of conflicts can be modelled. A number of possible conflict types are distinguished and it is described how each of them can be detected during the design process, using an explicit meta-representation. Furthermore, it is shown how these conflict types can be analyzed and managed by means of strategic meta-knowledge about design processes.