Predicting Design conflicts using Declarative Language Approach

While collaborative designing keeps on showing its capability in improving the efficiency of product designing and optimizing the quality of product, conflict management still remains a great challenge for this promising designing mode. By summarizing the basic principles for conflict management in feature based 3D collaborative designing, this paper presents a conflict prediction and prevention solution. Using an inspecting server to receive the stepwise designing process message from each site written in declarative language, the server would be able to predict the potential conflict by extracting critical parameters from these messages. Afterwards, a negotiation-based conflict prevention approach is proposed by transmitting messages between clients and server/client. Case studies show that the approach is an effective way to guarantee the designing model to be a consensus of designers.