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A Large Neighboring Search Schema for Multi-agent Optimization

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Book cover Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11008))

Abstract

The Distributed Constraint Optimization Problem (DCOP) is an elegant paradigm for modeling and solving multi-agent problems which are distributed in nature, and where agents cooperate to optimize a global objective within the confines of localized communication. Since solving DCOPs optimally is NP-hard, recent effort in the development of DCOP algorithms has focused on incomplete methods. Unfortunately, many of such proposals do not provide quality guarantees or provide a loose quality assessment. Thus, this paper proposes the Distributed Large Neighborhood Search (DLNS), a novel iterative local search framework to solve DCOPs, which provides guarantees on solution quality refining lower and upper bounds in an iterative process. Our experimental analysis of DCOP benchmarks on several important classes of graphs illustrates the effectiveness of DLNS in finding good solutions and tight upper bounds in both problems with and without hard constraints.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    An extended abstract of this work [6] appeared at AAMAS 2015.

  2. 2.

    However, it does not imply that the lower and upper bounds will converge to the same value.

  3. 3.

    We use DSA-B and set \(p=0.6\).

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Acknowledgments

The research at the Washington University in St. Louis was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant numbers 1550662 and 1540168. The research at New Mexico State University was supported by the NSF under grant numbers 1458595 and 1345232. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors only.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, USA

    Khoi D. Hoang & William Yeoh

  2. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

    Ferdinando Fioretto

  3. New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, USA

    Enrico Pontelli

  4. Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel

    Roie Zivan

Authors
  1. Khoi D. Hoang
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  2. Ferdinando Fioretto
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  3. William Yeoh
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  4. Enrico Pontelli
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  5. Roie Zivan
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Correspondence to Ferdinando Fioretto .

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  1. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    John Hooker

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Hoang, K.D., Fioretto, F., Yeoh, W., Pontelli, E., Zivan, R. (2018). A Large Neighboring Search Schema for Multi-agent Optimization. In: Hooker, J. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming. CP 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11008. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98334-9_44

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98334-9_44

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