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In the product dimensioning phase of a distributed design, inconsistencies can emerge among design objectives as well as among working procedures of heterogeneous subsystems. In this phase, design actors which compose subsystems must collaborate concurrently, since their works are linked to each other through dimensioning couplings among their sub-problems. Inconsistencies through these couplings yield thus to design conflicts. The issue is how to obtain a collaborative convergence to satisfy the global and individual objectives of design actors when making design decisions under uncertainty. The objective of this dissertation is to propose a model for preventing and resolving design conflicts in order to obtain a collaborative convergence, while overcoming the design uncertainty through Set-based Design (SBD). Design attitudes are modeled with Belief-Desire-Intention paradigm to explore inconsistencies and manage conflicts in design processes. The conventional bottom-up approach is thus extended through agent-based attitude modeling techniques. In this approach, design agents can set requirements directly on their wellbeing values that represent how their design targets are likely to be met at a given moment of the design process. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to evaluate the performance of this approach, providing a variety of agent attitudes. Compared to conventional bottomup and top-down design approaches, the results reveal a fewer number of design conflicts and a reduced aggregated conflict intensity. Constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) techniques and design attitudes are both applied to detect and justify design conflicts of heterogeneous design agents. A novel cooperative CSP (CoCSP) is developed in order to resolve design conflicts through compromising constraint restriction. The conflict resolution system can be adopted for different proposed strategies which take into account the solidarity architecture of design agents. The simulation results show that while promoting solidarity in distributed design by helping agents that suffer, the conflict intensity is reduced, and better design results are obtained.

Keywords:

Distributed design, Collaborative design, Concurrent engineering, Conflict prevention, Conflict resolution, Set-based design, Constraint satisfaction problem, Multi-agent systems