1 Design Propositions Evaluation : Using Viewpoint to manage Conflicts in CREOPS2 Christophe Cointe, Nada Matta, Myriam Ribiere INRIA (projet ACACIA) 2004 route des Lucioles BP. 93 06902 Sophia-Antipolis Cedex e-mail: {ccointe,nmatta,mribiere}@sophia.inria.fr ABSTRACT: Concurrent Engineering is a difficult task in which several designers collaborate together to build a system satisfying some requirements. In this task, individual design proposi- tions are communicated between designers and a consensual solution is determined, by managing conflicts. Requirements and knowledge about states of the artefact are also shared between designers. Viewpoint can be used to represent shared knowledge and to help to manage conflicts in Concurrent Engineering. We describe in this paper our proposition to manage viewpoint in this task, basing on a propositions communication architecture (CREOPS2) and on a conflict typol- ogy. KeyWords: Concurrent Engineering, Conflict, Knowledge Representation, Viewpoint, multi- agents architecture. INTRODUCTION In Concurrent Engineering (CE), several participants (designers, managers,...) in different special- ities, collaborate in order to construct a system (also called artifact), given the customer’s require- ments. Each designer has a particular perspective on the design process, depending on his post (who is he in the enterprise organisation?), his domain (context of work), and his knowledge learned from his experience (know-how, competence). This concept of particular perspective called viewpoint is already used in Object Oriented Representation and CE to allow a designer to use shared knowledge from his collaboration with the designer group. Conflicts can be revealed from disagreements between designers about proposed designs (called propositions) [12]. Such conflicts are detected in CE and negotiation methods are used to solve them. To handle CE, different types of knowledge will be distinguished and represented, e.g: Task organization, communication protocols, conflict management, knowledge sharing, task realiza- tion,... Our aim is to: • study CE task modelling and representation to define needs in CE task. We define also generic models to help the modelling of this task and specially the conflict management one. These models will provide generic components to be used (by a knowledge engineer 1 ) as building blocks in CE and conflict management task modelling for a real application [11]. We deter- mine a structure to support this task and to represent its particular components. This work is a part of the Genie 2 project, in which the CE task is analysed in order to provide guides for defin- 1.A Knowledge Engineer acquire knowledge and define a model for real applications.