Int. J. Collaborative Engineering, Vol. 1, Nos. 1/2, 2009 125

Copyright © 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.











Argumentation-based negotiation for collaborative
engineering design
Yan Jin*
Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering,
University of Southern California,
3650 McClintock Ave., OHE-430,
Los Angeles, CA 90089-1453, USA
Fax: (213) 740-8071 E-mail: yjin@usc.edu
*Corresponding author
Mathieu Geslin
Honda R&D Americas, Inc.,
1900 Harpers Way,
Torrance, CA 90501-2746, USA
E-mail: mathieumgeslin@gmail.com
Abstract: Designing complex systems requires collaboration among
multiple engineers who coordinate to plan tasks, cooperate to resolve
dependencies, and co-construct to identify shared objectives and solutions.
While collaboration technologies have been developed to date, few can help
designers negotiate effectively and reach agreement efficiently. In this paper,
we propose an argumentation based engineering negotiation approach
that provides a structured framework for designers to specify design situations,
compose arguments, and make joint decisions by following various strategies.
The details of the proposed approach are described and a case study
is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.
Keywords: collaborative design; negotiation; argumentation; coordination;
cooperation; decision-making; co-construction; agreement.
Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Jin, Y. and Geslin, M.
(2009) ‘Argumentation-based negotiation for collaborative engineering design’,
Int. J. Collaborative Engineering, Vol. 1, Nos. 1/2, pp.125–151.
Biographical notes: Yan Jin is Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical
Engineering in the Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern
California. He earned his PhD in Naval Engineering from University of Tokyo.
His current research interests include design methodology, agent-based
collaborative engineering, and computational organisation modelling. He is a
recipient of National Science Foundation CAREER Award (1998),
TRW Excellence in Teaching Award (2001), and Xerox Best Paper Award
(ASME International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology, 2002).

126 Y. Jin and M. Geslin













Mathieu Geslin is senior engineer at Honda R&D Americas Incorporated
located in Torrance, California. He earned his PhD Degree from University
of Southern California and did research on argumentative negotiation for
collaborative engineering. He also holds an MS in Mechanical Engineering
from Ecole Centrale de Lille, France. He is currently engaged in racing car
research and development activities.

1 Introduction
Collaborative engineering design is an activity in which multiple stakeholders
are involved. The overall product development task is decomposed into subtasks
which are assigned to multiple designers. To develop local design solutions, designers
must collaborate with each other to deal with the dependencies between their subtasks.
The final design solution is realised by integrating and synthesising the sub-solutions.
Depending on the complexity of the design task, design teams may employ
different forms of collaboration during design. Following activity theory (Leontjev, 1978;
Engeström, 1987), we differentiate among three forms of collaboration, namely,
coordination, cooperation, and co-construction. Coordination is a form of collaboration
that calls for preplanning of design tasks and developing interaction rules and policies for
designers to follow. Coordination emphasises predefined orders of tasks and roles of
participants. It is highly effective for less complex and more routine design tasks
where subtasks can be predefined and the composition of the final solution can be
pre-determined because most dependencies are sequential. Cooperation refers to
designers’ interactions carried out to deal with reciprocal dependencies between their
subtasks. In this case, one designer’s design decisions may influence the decisions of
another and vice versa. Designers focus on their shared problems, trying to find mutually
acceptable ways to solve them. Co-construction is needed for highly complex and
original design tasks, for which there is no clear and commonly acceptable way to
approach the design. In this case, team members must co-construct subtasks and develop
ways to solve the subtasks. Co-construction can result in new design requirements,
constraints and evaluation criteria. It is worth mentioning that the above three forms of
collaboration often co-exist in one single collaborative design process; one may be more
dominate than the others depending on the nature of the design problem.
Research on collaborative design has addressed the issues of coordination and
cooperation, but little has been done to deal with co-construction. Process modelling
and management based technologies have been developed to support coordination.
Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT)/Critical Path Method (CPM)
(Joseph et al., 1995) and Design Structure Matrix (DSM) (Steward, 1981; Eppinger
et al., 1994) were developed for task planning. Design Roadmap Framework (Park and
Cutkosky, 1999) was proposed to represent large scale engineering processes.
To facilitate both process modelling and process information exchange, Process
Interchange Format (PIF) (Lee et al., 1998) and Process Specification Language
(PSL) (Michel and Cutting-Decelle, 2004) were proposed. Besides process modelling
languages and systems, efforts have been made to support coordination by facilitating
information sharing among designers. DICE (Sriram and Logcher, 1993) utilises
a centralised database system, while Designworld (Genesereth and Katchpel, 1994),