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Purpose -Collaborative processes are relatively complex and are therefore difficult to handle. Representing the joint processes and capturing the interactions among stakeholders in a structured way are critical to improve the collaboration productivity. This paper aims to present a generic collaborative process model that improves on current approaches by explicitly representing the perspectives of stakeholders and their evolution traversing a work process. Design/methodology/approach -This approach provides a mechanism to identify the interdependencies among tasks and stakeholders, and realizes collaboration through process management. A web-based information system using the model to support collaborative process management is also described. Findings -The research work provides collaboration management systems with the ability to analyze and control the processes through sharing perspectives. Originality/value -The models and methods described in this paper are an important part of a pervasive, resilient and predictable means for business process management over the internet.

To support the collaboration negotiation of group decision-making activities in manufacturing systems integration, the authors have developed an approach to structure the negotiation argument with identified and organised objectives and preferences. This paper reviews relevant research work and presents the framework and methods of this approach. To overcome the limitations of these works in structuring argument for effective collaborative negotiation, our approach synthesises a value-focused objective hierarchy with the generic argument structure to specify how the arguments can be generated based on stakeholders' proposals, objectives, criteria and preferences, and then exchanged amongst multiple stakeholders. This synthesis framework also helps us suggest operational methods to evaluate the arguments based on the level of the objectives achievement. In addition, this paper describes a prototype system which implements our approach using the advanced web-based software technologies with the goal of demonstrating how to systematically carry out effective collaborative negotiation of group decisions in manufacturing systems integration.

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