Asynchronous aggregation and consistency in distributed constraint satisfaction Original Research Article

Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP) have been very successful in problem-solving tasks ranging from resource allocation and scheduling to configuration and design. Increasingly, many of these tasks pose themselves in a distributed setting where variables and constraints are distributed among different agents. A variety of asynchronous search algorithms have been proposed for addressing this setting. We show how two techniques commonly used in centralized constraint satisfaction, value aggregation and maintaining arc consistency can be applied to increase efficiency in an asynchronous, distributed context as well, and report on experiments that quantify the gains.