Distributed Search by Constrained Agents: Algorithms, Performance, Communication (Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing)

Description

Agent technology is evolving as a leading field of research connected to diverse areas such as A.I., E-commerce, robotics and information retrieval. Agents systems use reasoning and constraint-based reasoning that has a wide potential for representing multiple types of problems. A fundamental building block within all these areas is the ability to perform search and an inherent part of all agents must therefore relate to distributed and cooperative methods of search.

This book presents a comprehensive discussion on the field of distributed constraints, its algorithms and its active research areas. It introduces distributed constraint satisfaction and optimization problems and proceeds to present a complete state-of-the-art in DisCSP & DisCOP research. The presentation assumes no prior knowledge of constraints or distributed constraints.