Delegation in Tree-search for Distributed Constraint Satisfaction

We introduce the idea of delegation in distributed tree-search, as a method to reduce the communication overhead when solving Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problems (DisCSPs). With delegation, an agent can eliminate some direct forward links to child neighbours and choose intermediaries for communicating with such children. We present an algorithm which constructs long delegation paths automatically, and we prove that given certain assumptions it does not decrease privacy. We show experimentally that delegation can reduce messages by 50% for hard problems, although at the expense of more constraint checks.