Alignment of Goals between Agents in a Collaborative Decision Process
R. T. Sreeram, Pravir K. Chawdhry · 2023
This paper views collaborative product development as a multi-agent decision process where the agents have their own preferences towards a common goal. These preferences often lead to conflicts between agents on certain shared design parameters. For the resolution of such parametric conflicts, the authors use a combination of game theory and dependency based reasoning encapsulated in a negotiation scheme. The scheme also presents certain additional criteria for isolating a single negotiated solution. A case study of the design and manufacture of a Geneva mechanism is used as a test vehicle to investigate conflicts between: (a) software- software agents, (b) software – human agents and (c) human – human agents. The results obtained from this study indicate that the combination of game theory and dependency based techniques assists in maintaining rationality and alignment of preferences between agents in a decision process .