• Calendar

June 22, Tuesday
12:00 – 13:30

Many real-world problems are distributed by nature. Examples include network file systems, the scheduling of meetings among multiple agents, flight scheduling, industrial control systems, mobile sensor nets, wireless routing, etc. Agents or nodes that solve such distributed problems often coordinate their moves and share information to improve the efficiency of the problem solving process. Distributed search for solving distributed constraints problems is a domain in which agentsare naturally cooperative. In problems such as the meetings scheduling, agents are assumed to cooperate faithfully in finding a globally optimal solution. The degree of information sharing by the agents during search spans a wide range. At one extreme one can have an algorithm that involves sharing complete information by the agents. At this extreme case several agents can appoint a single representative (mediator) to solve their combined search problem by itself. The mediator agent receives the complete information of the agents and uses it for the search it performs. When coordination among the agents during search is less tight, agents could keep their private information about their constraints with other agents and only respond to specific requests about constraints values. At this other extreme we propose the use of asymmetric constraints among agents.