Management of an intelligent argumentation network for a web-based collaborative engineering design environment

Conflict resolution is one of the most challenging tasks in collaborative engineering design. In the previous research, a web-based intelligent collaborative system was developed to address this challenge based on intelligent computational argumentation. However, two important issues were not resolved in that system: priority of participants and self-conflicting arguments. In this thesis, two methods are developed for incorporating priorities of participants into the computational argumentation network: 1) weighted summation and 2) re-assessment of strengths of arguments based on priority of owners of the argument using fuzzy logic inference. In addition, a method for detection of self-conflicting arguments was developed --Abstract, page iii