Complex modern artifacts are often designed collaboratively by both human and machine agents with different areas of expertise in a multi-agent system (MAS) environment. The interaction of such agents inevitably invokes exceptions, which are not well-addressed due to their sophistication. This paper focuses on conflicts, the primary presentation of exceptions among agents, and considers mainly conflict resolution (CR) in a knowledge-based system consisting of both machine-based and human designer agents. Based on previous studies, we propose a generic taxonomy of conflicts, a preliminary integrated conflict management mechanism, and a general CR scheme. A new system architecture is also presented in the paper, with the discussion of a case study.