22 Analysis of Negotiation Protocols for Distributed Design Available to Purchase

Design is generally a collaborative activity involving multiple individuals and multiple design tools. Different domain experts and domain specific tools are needed to bring specialized knowledge and analysis to bear on different aspects of the design problem. Moreover, for large-scale design problems, decomposing the overall design problem and assigning different parts of it to separate individuals or design teams is the only way to manage the problem's complexity. Since design decisions made by the different individuals are not independent, the team must coordinate and integrate their decisions in order to reach a final design agreeable to all participants. Even when all the participants can be brought together in one place, reaching the best compromise to a constrained multicriteria decision problem can be challenging. When the participants work for different organizations located at different geographic locations, the problem takes on a new dimension of difficulty. Using modern information technologies to solve these problems is the subject of this chapter.