Coordination-Based Solver Cooperation in DICE

DICE (DIstributed Constraint Environment) is a software framework, implemented in the Manifold coordination language, for constructing distributed constraint solvers. Currently it supports the cooperation of solvers that can act as a domain reduction operator inside a constraint propagation algorithm. In this paper we propose a number of extensions to the framework, that will provide support for a larger variety of solver cooperation schemes. The paper gives a high-level informal description of the current framework and the extensions, and shows how the target system can be used to implement a number of existing solver