The Study Of Coordination Mechanism Of Engineering Process Conflict

The process control is an important decision-making issue between stakeholders, in large-scale engineering construction project. The process conflicts happens frequently during construction, between the owner,general contractor,subcontractors which are contractual relationship, and between subcontractors which are equal in status. Besides the complexity of process control itself, the main cause of these problems rest with the conflict of interest behind process conflict. Every stakeholder makes his decisions from their own perspectives, without considering the interactive impacts between each other's decision, the project management practices lack the equilibrium optimization. The main process conflict coordination approaches establish process conflict coordination mathematic programming model, basing on the Centralized Decision Making, where the central decision-maker has to collect all information, and the model can hardly be changed once it is constructed. It has a lot of limitation in project practice, due to ignoring the autonomy of the stakeholders. Especially it is not easy to be applied in the project dynamic environment where information is incomplete and inaccurate.With the purpose of improving the cooperative relationship in cooperative project organization, starting with the interest coordination, by generally applying system engineering theory, game theory and some other methods for system optimization and decision-making modeling, this dissertation focuses on process conflict coordination for general contractor engineering, and qualitatively analyze and quantitatively model to gain some effective coordination tactics. At the same time, due to the dynamic environment,information incompletion and decentralized decision, negotiation between stakeholders becomes an important approach to coordinate the conflict of interest behind process conflict. So, basing on the quantitative models abovementioned, this dissertation studied the MAS coordination applied in project process conflict coordination. The main contents and conclusions are as follows:Firstly, the coordination problem of process conflicts may be separated into three coordination layers: the communication layer, the negotiation layer and interest coordination layer, in which the latter two layers is core issue. Taking into account the self-government of the stakeholder, the equilibrium optimization as main approach is advocated. Analyze the principal agent decision relationship between the general contractor and the subcontractor and the peer-to-peer negotiation relationship between the subcontractors, during the conflict coordination. Due to the limits of the centralized coordination pattern, an integrative coordination pattern is put forward.In vertical line, the project owner,general contractor and sub-contractor is principal agent relationship. Following important issues need answered: from the general contractor perspective, how to selectively inspire critical subcontractors to achieve his whole goal and how much inspiration density is optimal? From the subcontractor perspective, how much the compression time is appropriate, given the inspiration density from the general contractor.Based on the game theory and bi-level programming method, with the purpose of increasing the revenues, with the general contractor as leader and subcontractors as followers, a Stackelberg model about dynamic interactive decision-making behaviors for process conflict coordination during construction is established. The equilibrium solution and interactive influencing between decision variables of general contractor and sub-contractor are analyzed and inferred theoretically. The research results showed that the model can help to actualize coordination optimization of project process and Pareto improvement of revenue object for the stakeholders in contract. Furthermore, considering the owner's revenue of project operation stage and the general contractor's opportunity cost etc, a two-stage Stackelberg model is put forward through an extended study.In the level, subcontractors are equal in the status. They form into dynamic alliance to deal with the process conflicts. Following issues need answered: What kind of cooperative agreement is to gain? How to make decision during the coordination? How to allocate the coordination revenues soundly?Introduce multi-agent TCTP (MaTCTP) to coordinate the process conflicts between the subcontractors. Considering the self-interesting and independency of subcontractor, a compensation mechanism is devised to attack the benefit transfer issue in MaTCTP.Model the process of resolving MaTCTP as negotiation coordination between activities of different subcontractors, in which each activity negotiates with each other about its activity time and the compensation fee, basing its resource and cost information. A mathematical model for process conflict coordination is given based on Cooperative Game Theory. The Shapley Value method is applied to the cooperative benefit sharing among the subcontractors.The coordination models abovementioned do not come down to the process of how the agreements were got, it is necessary to establish the negotiation model to depict these processes. Moreover, the dynamic environment of engineering project lead to the"contract imperfectness", negotiation between stakeholders naturally becomes an appropriate and important approach to resolve process conflicts. Basing on three assumptions, namely individual rationality, information exchange and MAS negotiation, the multi-agent negotiation coordination model for the process conflict is proposed.Model the project network using the multi-agent methodology and establish the multi-agent virtual alliance for the process conflict coordination. In the multi-agent virtual alliance, agents can act the MAgent or RAgent roles, MAgent delegates the upper decision maker such as general contractor et al, RAgent delegates the lower decision maker such as subcontractor et al. MAgent and RAgent are the principal agent relationship, the RAgents are parallel peer to peer relationship, they negotiate each other to resolve the process conflicts between themselves.Firstly we discuss the negotiation between RAgents. Give the collective goal of all RAgents, model the interaction between RAgent. The RAgent's individual utility function and the reason process are given, so that the RAgent can come into the collective goal in pursuit of individual rationality. Finally, the two stage promises negotiation protocol and the negotiation steps are designed to support interaction between RAgents, and a dynamic reschedule example during engineering project construction stage is given to illustrate the process of negotiation coordination for process conflict between subcontrators. Basing on the contract net protocol and automation negotiation model, MAgent and RAgent negotiate to resolve the conflict between them. They establish the preparatory negotiation intent through the contract net protocol, and then, both sides go into bargaining about the duration and the compensation fee. The preference model,utility function and decision functions is given. Finally, simulation analysis is given on the basis of the data given in third chapter. The MAS negotiation coordination is more practical and easy to use. These works may have great importance on multi-stakeholder project process conflict coordination and distributed dynamic schedule decision system and so on.