Design Rationale for Computer-Supported Conflict Mitigation

Abstract

The development of large-scale engineering systems requires the collaboration of numerous specialists. Their decisions reflect their different perspectives of a project and these different perspectives typically lead to many conflicts. These conflicts, if not resolved early, create more expensive designs, delays in the design-construction process, and compromises in the final product. This paper presents research on the representation, use, and communication of design rationale for conflict mitigation in a collaborative environment. This research is based on the view that: (1) The designers' perspectives are expressed in their design rationale; (2) a system for capturing the design rationale needs to represent and manage design intent evolution, artifact evolution, and relationships between intents and between intent and artifact; (3) a design rationale system needs to capture its information in a nonintrusive manner by providing part of the design rationale; and (4) a system for conflict mitigation needs to provide active computer support for the negotiation between multiple participants. Based on these requirements, this paper proposes “Design Recommendation and Intent Model (DRIM)” as an ontology for design rationale and “SHARED-Design Recommendation and Intent Management System (SHARED-DRIMS)” as a system for conflict mitigation based on this ontology.