ConsensusBuilder: Collaborative Engineering Decision Support for Distributed Design of Complex Electro-Mechanical Products

The goal of this project is to develop ConsensusBuilder, a collaborative working environment which supports distributed team argumentation, negotiation, and consensus building through decision support. Based on a natural model of team decision making, this system enables the capture of the design rationale in value-added activities. Team support is provided for ad-hoc activities, those based on engineering best practices, and for methods that integrate evaluation results. The architecture of ConsensusBuilder allows for the future expansion to other design processes. The Phase I proposal is focused on developing a design for ConsensusBuilder using current software development best practice as a strategy for applying ConsensusBuilder to its own design. In other words, the ConsensusBuilder model developed in earlier research will be refined toward implementation using the current model on paper to support key decisions. ConsensusBuilder is the result of over 12 years of studying and modeling design engineers by the PIs, and the integration of research results from the fields of negotiation and argumentation modeling, design rationale capture, decision theoretics, and engineering best practices. The model underlying this proposal forms a basis for capturing design rationale by integrating best practices (current and new) and by providing tools to support team decision making.