Mixed quantitative/qualitative method for evaluating compromise solutions to conflicts in collaborative design

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 [Bahler et al. 1994a, Bahler et al. 1994b] 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.