AGENT BEHAVIOR STUDY IN CONFLICT CAUSE IDENTIFICATION IN DISTRIBUTED COLLABORATIVE DESIGN SYSTEM

Conflict has become a critical issue in modern-day engineering design, which involves collaborative designers from different engineering background and often located in different places. This paper first presents a well -organized structure of conflict classes and causes. Then, a r ule-based model is presented to describe how the human design agents behave in the distributed design environment and their influence in the design process. Based on these insights, a computational model is developed to autonomously identify the conflict causes in the on-going design process, supporting the conflict management. The agent behavior model and conflict cause identification methods are tested in the Plane World, a conceptual aircraft design simulation.