Modeling and analyzing agents' collective options in collaborative decision making situations using the constrained rationality framework

Decision Makers involved in multi-agent collaborative decision making situations, such as requirements engineering, system design, and product development have to satisfy different and conflicting strategic goals and realities that they individually have. In most cases, they adopt an option that considers only the needs and realities of few, while ignoring or suppressing the others' needs and realities. Constrained Rationality is a formal qualitative framework to model and analyze ill-structured strategic multi-agent conflicts. In this paper, we show how the framework is used in collaborative decision making to: 1) model the agents' collective and individual goals, constraints and priorities; 2) analyze each of the proposed collective options; and 3) elicit the agents' collective preferences over their options. The framework's usage and benefits is illustrated by modeling and analyzing a simplified version of an industrial collaborative multi-agent requirements engineering case.