CONCENSUS - MULTIPARTY NEGOTIATION SUPPORT FOR CONFLICT-RESOLUTION INCONCURRENT ENGINEERING DESIGN

Advances in telematics have led many manufacturing companies in partic ular to explore the adoption of groupware technology to improve commun ication between team members. However, complex activities such as conf lict resolution are still predominantly facilitated through face-to-fa ce negotiation meetings. Intelligent software agents technology is bei ng applied to support computer-mediated conflict resolution activities , such as information search and retrieval, recording negotiation proc ess history and task allocation - whilst the creative negotiation acti vities such as generating new solutions, preventing and detecting conf licts are still left to the human experts. This paper describes the de velopment of a framework for the support of multi-party negotiation fo r multi-agent systems, which will be introduced through a general over view of the requirements of multi-agent negotiation. Finally, the curr ent architecture of the developed prototype for a CONCurrent Engineeri ng Negotiation SUpport System (CONCENSUS) is presented. (C) 1998 Chapm an & Hall.