Distributed Constraint Reasoning

Abstract

This tutorial aims on the one hand side to provide an introduction into distributed constraint reasoning and on the other side to highlight the current research trends in the area. The tutorial draws from earlier tutorials by Makoto Yokoo (CP98), Jorg Denzinger (IJCAI01) and Yokoo, Denzinger and Marius Silaghi (IJCAI03, AAMAS04, IJCAI05) and from the PhD dissertations of Silaghi and Adrian Petcu. The previous tutorials were created as half-day tutorials and this was also the planned time frame for this tutorial. Consequently, we had the hard decisions to make which of the concepts to present and where to put foci. We decided to focus the introduction part on asynchronous methods and to highlight new approaches to constraint optimization and the whole topic of semi-cooperative agents with its connections to issues like privacy and reigning in the competitiveness of agents. To make up for this rather subjective selection, we include a structured bibliography of works on distributed knowledge-based search and distributed constraint reasoning with some notations of where to place the particular works.