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

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 still predominantly 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 negotiation process 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 support of 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 Negotiation SUpport System (CONCENSUS) is presented. (C) 1998 Chapman & Hall.