Conflict analysis across heterogeneous viewpoints: formalization and visualization

Abstract

Negotiation in cooperative modeling environments requires stakeholders to achieve a shared understanding while maintaining their own interpretation, in order to achieve creative design solutions. Complementing meeting oriented groupware systems which continuously enforce a central group perspective, we present an approach that maintains multiple perspectives and knowledge about their interrelationships and conflicts simultaneously. The approach comprises three aspects: a meta modeling strategy aiming at controlled use of redundancy for conflict analysis; a flexible multi-matrix visualization strategy generalizing the "House of Quality" notation of TQM; and an object oriented query class concept by which knowledge about the evolution of negotiation problems is automatically maintained. The approach has been implemented using the meta data manager ConceptBase for modeling and query class handling, and the CoDecide toolkit for visualization. A number of practical experiences in scientific and commercial modeling projects provide evidence that formal meta models and formally based visualization of conflicts lead to better models and a more focused, faster process.