Multitarget Hierarchical Negotiation for Distributed Design in Collaborative Product Development

Distributed design in collaborative product development involves interorganizational teams of different disciplines, often geographically separated, that work jointly for the interest of an overall goal. The teams must agree on the product design without fully disclosing individual design information. Price-based negotiation is an effective design methodology under such circumstances. This work improves the negotiation mechanism based on the price schedules decomposition algorithm (PSDA), which only allows bi-level negotiation with a single design target, in two regards. The augmented price schedules decomposition algorithm (APSDA) is proposed to simultaneously consider multiple design targets in negotiation. Decision models and negotiation protocols are developed for complex design tasks decomposed in a hierarchy. The resultant APSDA-based negotiation mechanism enables multi-target hierarchical distributed design. A test scenario implemented with multiagent technologies validates the effectiveness of this mechanism. This study solves automating engineering collaborations with secure information sharing.