Multi-criteria Decision Analysis for Change Negotiation in Process Collaborations

In a process collaboration, changes rarely confine themselves to a single company, but can spread over the network of partners, resulting in a whole process of negotiation. This paper employs techniques from the domains of multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) and group decision to deal with change negotiation in process collaborations. In particular, it utilizes multi-criteria reasoning to model preferences of collaborators over different criteria. A particular issue in this context is scaling since in a collaboration of heterogeneous partners, identical outcomes might have different meanings for partners. A role-play experiment has been conducted with students from computer science and business administration in order to simulate change negotiation using realistic process collaboration scenarios. The experiment results have been analyzed and in turn, compared to the different normative solutions, representing various approaches to fairness and efficiency of group solutions.