Study of Argumentative Negotiation in Collaborative Design

Engineering of complex systems often involves teamwork. The team members must work together to identify requirements, explore design spaces, generate design alternatives, and make both interactive and joint design decisions. Due to the latency of information and the disciplinary differences, it is often a difficult process for the team members to reach agreements when needed. Negotiation has been studied as a method for facilitating information exchange, mutual understanding, and joint decision-making. In our previous work, we introduced an argumentation-based negotiation framework to support collaborative design. In this paper, we present an experiment study that was conducted to assess the impact of this negotiation support approach on the process and the outcome of collaborative design. The results of the experiment have shown both the positive effects and limitations of the approach.