Modern engineering design commonly involves the cooperative effort of design experts, who often come from different engineering backgrounds, have different geological locations, and communicate primarily via the web. Conflicts, which commonly exist in the design process, are exacerbated by this situation. This paper first presents a well-organized structure of conflict classes and causes. Based on an analysis of conflict nature and conflict-related human behavior in the concurrent engineering design, a new computational model for autonomously identifying the conflict cause in the web-based concurrent engineering design environment is developed and tested. The Plane World design simulation system is used as a test-bed to demonstrate and verify the conflict cause identification methods developed in this work.
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