Distributed constraint satisfaction: foundation and applications

Abstract

When multiple agents are in a shared environment, there usually exist constraints among the possible actions of these agents. A distributed constraint satisfaction problem (distributed CSP) is a problem to find a consistent combination of actions that satisfies these inter-agent constraints. The research on constraint satisfaction problems has a long and distinguished history in AI as a general framework that can formalize various application problems. Similarly, a distributed CSP is a fundamental problem for achieving coordination among agents and can formalize various application problems in multi-agent systems.