Impact of Argumentative Negotiation on Collaborative Engineering

Engineering of complex systems involves multiple disciplinary design teams with diversified skills. The team members must work together to make joint decisions, but are often faced with difficulties when trying to reach agreements. Negotiation has been studied as a method for facilitating information exchange, mutual understanding, and joint decision-making. In our previous work, we introduced an argumentative negotiation model to support collaborative engineering. In this paper, we present an experiment study that was conducted to assess the impact of this negotiation support system on the process and the outcome of collaborative design. The results of the experiment have demonstrated the positive effects of the approach.