CONFLICTS AND NEGOTIATION IN SINGLE FUNCTION AGENT BASED DESIGN SYSTEMS

A basic ingredient of Concurrent Engineering (CE) is that all aspects of the product's life cycle should be considered as early as possible during design. A key idea that has been adopted for the implementation of CE is the use of a team, in which each member is an expert on some aspect of the product in a phase of its life cycle. In our work, we u se a team of software agents. Our goal is to study in detail the inter actions, conflicts, and conflict resolution that is possible with such a multiagent system. The approach is to use Single Function Agents (S iFAs), each of which can perform a very specialized task, from a singl e point of view. The ability to represent expertise with different poi nts of view is very important in design. These different points of vie w usually cause conflicts among agents, and these conflicts need to be resolved in order for the design process to be successful. Therefore, agents need to be capable of detecting and resolving these conflicts. This paper presents a model of conflicts and negotiations in the SiFA framework. A hierarchy of possible conflicts is proposed and the step s of the negotiation process are discussed.