Agent based negotiation for collaborative design decision making

Complex design involves trade-offs and teamwork. To make collaborative design decisions, designers must negotiate with each other to resolve their discrepancies through exploring the design space, generating new ideas and compromising for agreement. Advances in negotiation research have been made in social psychology, distributed artificial intelligence, and decision theory. But few have been applied to design. Built on existing negotiation research, we are developing an agent based negotiation framework to support collaborative design decision-making. This paper presents the negotiation protocol, information models, and negotiation strategies of the framework followed by discussion of an application case example.