Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Design can be modeled as a multi-agent planning task where several agents that possess different expertise and evaluation criteria cooperate to produce a design. The differences m a y result in conflicts that have to be resolved during design. The process by which conflict resolution is achieved is negotiation. In this paper, w e propose a model of group problem solving among cooperating experts that supports negotiation. The model incorporates accessing information from a case memory of existing designs, communication of design rationale, evaluation and critiquing of design decisions. Incremental design modifications are performed based on constraint relaxation and comparison of utilities.