Group Decision-based Collaborative Design

In recent years, there is a growing recognition that decisions are the fundamental construct in product design. The collaborative design process gets more complex when a group of geographically dispersed designers work as a team. In this paper, we take a group decision-based approach to model design process and introduce an agent-based architecture to support collaborative design. The proposed architecture achieves the design decisions integration between design members in a dynamic design environment. In particular, the proposed agents can provide the interaction spaces for coordinating the individual design decisions. Finally, the mechanism of coordination between agents is discussed.