Enabling Local Risk Assessment to Support Global Collaboration in a Distributed Environment

Risk is a crucial criterion for decision making among multiple stakeholders negotiating for an agreement in a distributed environment. The challenge here is that risk may have different meanings and implications to different stakeholders, and this creates considerable barriers to effective negotiation and coordination in collaborative design. Our goal is to 1) capture the heterogeneous risk information at intra- and inter- stakeholder levels, 2) represent them using a uniform structure based on a function-failure relationship, and 3) enable the negotiation of the risk information among the multiple stakeholders through this uniform structure. Though a significant number of existing methods for risk analysis and management have been developed, these methods mainly focus on the local domain of a certain single stakeholder, and few have considered the possible influence and variations related to global aspects that is important for negotiation among multiple, distributed stakeholders. This work develops intra-level risk property tables to capture and represent the various risk evaluations from individual members in a single stakeholder; and then inter-level risk property tables are formed based on the synthesis of the various intra-level risk properties into a group representation for the single stakeholder, which is directly used in global negotiation and coordination with other stakeholders. An adjustable approach is used in our work to enable the adjustability of the intra- and inter- level risk evaluations via negotiation. An example problem from a NSF/NEES-sponsored research collaborative network is used to demonstrate the use of this method. The preliminary results show that this method has potential in enabling local risk assessment to support global negotiation and coordination in a distributed, collaborative environment.Copyright © 2006 by ASME