Weixiong Zhang

Volker Sorge

Distributed and multi-agent systems are becoming more and more the focus of attention in artificial intelligence research and have already found their way into many practical applications. An important prerequisite for their success is an ability to flexibly adapt their behavior via intelligent cooperation. Successful reasoning about and within a multi-agent system is therefore paramount to achieve intelligent behavior. Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problems (DCSPs) and Distributed Constraint Optimization (minimization) Problems (DCOPs) are perhaps ubiquitous in distributed systems in dynamic environments. Many important problems in distributed environments and systems, such as action coordination, task scheduling and resource allocation, can be formulated and solved as DCSPs and DCOPs. Therefore, techniques for solving DCSPs and DCOPs as well as strategies for automated reasoning in distributed systems are indispensable tools in the research areas of distributed and multi-agent systems. They also provide promising frameworks to deal with the increasingly diverse range of distributed real world problems emerging from the fast evolution of communication technologies. The volume is divided in two parts. One part contains papers on distributed constraint problems in multi-agent systems. The other part presents papers on Agents and Automated Reasoning.

Distributed Constraint Problem Solving and Reasoning in Multi-agent Systems

This book is particularly concerned with heuristic state-space search for combinatorial optimization. Its two central themes are the average-case complexity of state-space search algorithms and the applications of the results notably to branch-and-bound techniques. Primarily written for researchers in computer science, the author presupposes a basic familiarity with complexity theory, and it is assumed that the reader is familiar with the basic concepts of random variables and recursive functions. Two successful applications are presented in depth: one is a set of state-space transformation methods which can be used to find approximate solutions quickly, and the second is forward estimation for constructing more informative evaluation functions.

Weixiong Zhang

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