Conflict Management as Part of an Integrated Exception Handling Approach

Abstract

Collaborative design conflicts are an important type of process “exception”, i.e. a reallife contingency such as a process change, execution error or missed opportunity that leads to sub-optimal performance of a collaborative process. This chapter presents an integrated computational approach to collaborative process exception handling that avoids important weaknesses in current conflict management methods through the synergistic integration of conflict, workflow and rationale technology. The approach is based on an inclusive dependency language plus co ordination services for dependency capture, process enactment and exception handling. An initial implementation of this model called “iDCSS” is presented and challenges for future evolution of this technology are identified.