Abstract
The design of complex artifacts has increasingly become a cooperative process, with the detection and resolution of conflicts between design agents playing a central role. Effective tools for supporting conflict management, however, are still lacking. This article describes DCSS (the Design Collaboration Support System), a system developed to meet this challenge in teams with both human and machine-based design agents. Every agent has an “assistant” that provides domain-independent conflict detection, explanation, and resolution expertise. Agents and assistants cooperate synergistically during design to resolve conflicts as they arise. Agents describe their design decisions using a generic least-commitment design model. Assistants provide libraries of conflict detection techniques, built on unsatisfiable constraint set detection, to help flag conflicts between decisions made by different agents. Once a conflict has been detected, assistants use design rationale provided by the agents as well as a generic conflict-cause taxonomy to suggest possible explanations for the conflict. Finally, assistants provide suggestions for resolving a conflict by instantiating domain-independent strategies using domain-specific expertise elicited from the design agents. DCSS has been used successfully to support cooperative design of Local Area Networks by human and machine-based agents. This article includes a description of DCSS's underlying model and implementation, examples of its operation, and an evaluation of its strengths, weaknesses, and potential for future growth.
Published Version
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