Conflicts Mitigation in Collaborative Design

Conflict management is an unavoidable stage of the collaborative design process.We assume that classifying conflict causes can help conflict prevention as well asdetection and resolution strategies. Our approach proposes a crossed classificationof conflict causes and the correspondent mitigation strategies andimplements this classification in order to enable conflict detection in the earlierphases of the design process. Emphasis is put on capture and use of designrationale and knowledge to help conflict mitigation. Based on this approach, aconflict mitigation module integrated in an advanced architecture for concurrentdesign and manufacturing is presented. A case study on the design of an electricconnector illustrates the use of this module.