Conflict Dissolution Research Articles

Eusociality through conflict dissolution.

Eusociality, where largely unreproductive offspring help their mothers reproduce, is a major form of social organization. An increasingly documented feature of eusociality is that mothers induce their offspring to help by means of hormones, pheromones or behavioural displays, with evidence often indicating that offspring help voluntarily. The co-occurrence of maternal influence and offspring voluntary help may be explained by what we call the converted helping hypothesis, whereby maternally manipulated helping subsequently becomes voluntary. Such hypothesis requires that parent-offspring conflict is eventually dissolved—for instance, if the benefit of helping increases sufficiently over evolutionary time. We show that help provided by maternally manipulated offspring can enable the mother to sufficiently increase her fertility to transform parent-offspring conflict into parent-offspring agreement. This conflict-dissolution mechanism requires that helpers alleviate maternal life-history trade-offs, and results in reproductive division of labour, high queen fertility and honest queen signalling suppressing worker reproduction—thus exceptionally recovering diverse features of eusociality. As such trade-off alleviation seemingly holds widely across eusocial taxa, this mechanism offers a potentially general explanation for the origin of eusociality, the prevalence of maternal influence, and the offspring’s willingness to help. Overall, our results explain how a major evolutionary transition can happen from ancestral conflict.

Verification and validation of IM-DeCRuD approach using DESMET for its applicability

Requirements crosscutting in software development and maintenance have gradually become an important issue in software engineering with a growing need of traceability support to better understand the requirements crosscutting processes to comply with industrial standards. However, many recent works focusing on identification, modularization, composition and conflict dissolution of requirements crosscutting are mostly saturated at requirements level. Hence, these works fail to specify crosscutting properties for functional and non-functional requirements at other phases leading to insufficient support for software engineers. Recently, a new approach called the Identification, Modularization, Design Composition Rules and Conflict Dissolutions (IM-DeCRuD) was proposed to provide a special traceability to facilitate better understanding and reasoning towards requirements crosscutting implementation, along with a tool as a proof-of-concept. In this paper, the tool was evaluated and the results were verified by some experts in the industries. The feedbacks on applicability aspect were then gathered and analyzed using DESMET qualitative method. The outcome showed that the IM-DeCRuD was applicable to cope with the tedious engineering processes in handling crosscutting properties at requirements, analysis and design phases for system development and evolution.

Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM): From Paradigm Lost to Paradigm Regained?

ABSTRACTBecause trade‐offs (Pareto optimal, non‐dominated or efficient sets) are not properties of criteria or objectives, but of sets of feasible alternatives, the proper task of decision making is to work on designing proper sets of alternatives rather than assuming them to be fixed and given a priori. In fact, decision making takes place only when multiple criteria and trade‐offs are present. All the rest (single criteria, aggregates or utilities) are simply analysis, measurement and search, not decision making.Similarly, optimization must involve design of the configuration or ‘shape’ of sets of alternatives because no given and fixed system can be optimized. Traditional ‘optimization’ is therefore measurement and search, or just computation. Anything given and fixed a priori cannot be optimized. Multiple criteria or objectives can never be conflicting per se because their properties emerge only when applied to different sets of alternatives. Criteria are only ‘measure tapes’ and no trade‐offs can exist among them. Because decision making is incompatible with a single criterion, all decision making involves multiple criteria: thus, Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) becomes a redundant designation.These and similar insights and conclusions call for MCDM paradigm re‐assessment: is it about decision making, or about analysis, measurement and search (explication) through computation? Eight different concepts of optimality are presented, as well as theories and models of trade‐offs elimination, conflict dissolution, optimal system design, de novo programming, theory of the displaced ideal and other advances related to feasible set optimal re‐design and re‐configuration. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Narrative Practice and Conflict Dissolution in Couples Therapy

This paper presents an approach to conflict dissolution through the story development of the lives of the partners. This activity includes the interruption of efforts to resolve difficulties through recourse to culturally venerated communicational processes; the erosion of exclusivity in couple relationships; and the adoption of other relational forms in ways that contributes to diversity of response in couple relationships. A case example with transcript excerpts illustrates this process.

The KM-MCDM interface in decision design: tradeoffs-free conflict dissolution

Concepts of decision design are introduced via Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), Knowledge Management (KM) and optimisation. Decision-making conflict is defined as the absence of a prominent tradeoffs-free alternative. Because tradeoffs are properties of alternatives (the measured) and not of criteria (the measures), designing an optimal decision involves designing a tradeoffs-free alternative (or its proxy). Decision-making process becomes more important than its outcome: high-quality process assures high-quality outcome, not vice versa. A merger of MCDM and KM into an integrated decision support is outlined. Process-based MCDM paradigm emerges: decision making is neither art nor science ? but knowledge-based skill or practice.

Conflict dissolution in the public sector: A case-study

The construction of a new railway link to the port of Lisbon has been postponed many times as a result of a conflict of different viewpoints held by various public stakeholders, namely between the municipality of Lisbon and the Lisbon Railway Node Bureau, while the Portuguese Railway Company has assumed a more flexible attitude. Over recent years, three groups of solutions, totalling nine alternative projects, have been proposed by each of these three actors, but none has been simultaneously accepted by all the three. The development of the urbanisation plan for Alcântara (the zone of the city where the railway line links to the port) has presented an opportunity to try to dissolve the conflict. This paper describes the multicriteria approach followed to support the creation of a new “good” (win–win) compromise solution by the planning team based on the study of the consequences of the existing alternatives. In particular, we describe the structuring phase of the study and the use of a disaggregation–aggregation approach to take into account the different value systems of the stakeholders.

Conflict dissolution by reframing game payoffs using linear perturbations

Human beings have a prevailing drive to achieve their self-interest goals or equilibrium states, which may subsume their social interests. An ideal working environment or cooperative game situation would be one in which each participant or player maximizes his/her own interest while maximizing his/her contribution to the collective group interest. This paper addresses the feasibility, methods, and bounds for reframing a generaln-person game into an ideal game in which full cooperation or a targeted solution can be induced and maintained by the players' self-interest maximization. Criteria for good reframing are introduced. Monotonic games, self-interest cooperative and noncooperative games, and a decomposition theory of general games are also introduced to facilitate the study. It is shown that everyn-person game can be written as the sum of a self-interest cooperative game and a self-interest noncooperative game. Everyn-person game can be reframed so that full cooperation can be achieved by the players' self-interest maximization. Everyn-person game can be reframed so that a targeted solution can be obtained and maintained through the players' self-interest maximization.