A conversation model for resolving conflicts among distributed office activities

Abstract

In many cases, office workers perform their tasks based on certain plans. In a cooperative environment, where many individuals establish their plans, conflicts between these plans will inevitably arise. A reason for conflicts between different plans is, for instance, the competition for shared resources such as special equipment or a reservation for a meeting room. In such cases, plans may prevent each other from being executed as intended, which reduces the overall performance of an organization. There are two main problems tackled by our approach: First, to detect potential conflicts between several individual plans as early as possible and, second, to relieve the actors in an organization as much as possible from their burden to settle conflicts. In our approach, conflicts are settled by an agreement among agents in conflict. The agreement is reached by a computer-mediated conversation (negotiation) between the agents. One key factor for the detection of conflicts among individually created plans and for guiding the conflict resolution process are the temporal relationships between actions in conflict. The role of temporal constraints for coordinating distributed activities will be described in detail.