Extended Abstract Dynamic Distributed Constraint Satisfaction for Resource Allocation.pdfVIP

Extended Abstract: Dynamic Distributed Constraint Satisfaction for Resource Allocation Pragnesh Jay Modi University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey, CA 90292, USA fmodi,g@ 1 Introduction Distributed resource allocation is a general problem in which a set of agents must in- telligently assign their resources to a set of tasks such that all tasks are performed with respect to certain criteria. This problem arises in many real-world domains su ch as distributed sensor networks [5], disaster rescue[3], hospital scheduling[1], and others. However, despite the variety of approaches proposed for distributed resource allocation, a systematic formalization of the problem, explaining the different sources of difficul- ties, and a formal explanation of the strengths and limitations of key approaches is missing. We propose a formalization of distributed resource allocation that is expressive enough to represent both dynamic and distributed aspects of the problem. These two aspects present some key difficulties. First, a distributed situation results in agents ob- taining only local information, but facing global ambiguity — an agent may know the results of its local operations but it may not know the global task and hence may not know what operations others should perform. Second, the situation is dynamic so a so- lution to the resource allocation problem at one time may become unsuccessful when the underlying tasks have changed. So the agents must continuously monitor the qual- ity of the solution and must have a way to express such changes in the problem. In order to address this type of resource allocation problem, the paper defines the notion of Dynamic Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problem (DDCSP). The central contribution of the paper is a reusable