Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problem

Abstract

In this chapter, we give a formal definition of distributed CSPs (Section 2.2). A distributed CSP is a CSP in which the variables and constraints are distributed among automated agents. Finding a value assignment; to variables that satisfies inter-agent constraints can be viewed as achieving coherence or consistency among agents. Achieving coherence or consistency is one of the main research topics in multi-agent systems (MAS). Therefore, distributed constraint satisfaction techniques can be considered as an important infrastructure for cooperation. As described in Section 2.3, various application problems in MAS can be formalized as distributed CSPs, by extracting the essential part of the problems. Once we formalize our application problem as a distributed CSP, we don’t have to develop algorithms for solving it from scratch, since various algorithms for solving distributed CSPs have been developed. We show the classification of these algorithms in Section 2.4.