Proactive meeting management for distributed collaborative design

This paper presents the CAIRO (Collaborative Agent Interaction control and synchROnization) system which is a distributed design negotiation environment that allows individuals to interact over computer networks without the physical and temporal constraints experienced in a traditional meeting environment. Requirements for a collaborative design negotiation environment are identified based on background research in meeting and negotiation processes as well as distributed artificial intelligence concepts. Furthermore, the paper describes an agent-based coordination and facilitation mechanism to support the design negotiation process, and a framework for effective documentation of meeting proceedings. These mechanisms are built on top of the CAIRO distributed communication infrastructure.