Adaptive constraint propagation has recently received a great attention. It allows a constraint solver to exploit various levels of propagation during search, and in many cases it shows better performance than static/predefined. The crucial point is to make adaptive constraint propagation automatic, so that no expert knowledge or parameter specification is required. In this work, we propose a s...

Multi-attribute (Multi-issue) negotiation protocols have been studied widely, and represent an important challenge in the multiagent systems community (Lai et al., 2004). Therefore, a lot of automated negotiation models and protocols have been developed, and manifold negotiation challenges have been already addressed. Most research in automated negotiation to date has focused on the competitive...

The paper begins with a definition of a constraint satisfaction problem. Lin noted that we were all quite familiar with this definition, but discussing it helped to use up time in his presentation. The paper describes two general methods for solving a CSP: generate and test (GT), and backtracking search (BT). GT generates possible combinations of variables and checks whether it has found a solu...

Traditional hypergraph partitioning algorithms compute a bisection a graph such that the number of hyperedges that are cut by the partitioning is minimized and each partition has an equal number of vertices. The task of minimizing the cut can be considered as the objective and the requirement that the partitions will be of the same size can be considered as the constraint. In this paper we exte...

MACBETH is a constraint-based tactical planning engine for multi-agent teams. MACBETH is designed for domains in which a human user must quickly specify a mission to a team of autonomous agents. In these domains, "puzzle-mode" thinking to come up with novel plans is not important; the key task is to rapidly and accurately tailor existing plans to novel situations. To this end, MACBETH combines ...

We consider the problem of computing optimal schedules in multi-agent systems. In these problems, actions of one agent can influence the actions of other agents, while the objective is to maximize the total ‘quality’ of the schedule. More specifically, we focus on multiagent scheduling problems with time windows, hard and soft precedence relations, and a nonlinear objective function. We show ho...

We present a formalism for programming complex multiagent reactive systems in a structured manner. The motivation behind this work is to obtain a simple semantic framework for such reactive systems. The approach followed is to build upon a timed extension of concurrent constraint programs that have been used to present an elegant declarative framework for reactive systems. Timed concurrent cons...

In this work we address the problem of arranging meetings for several participants taking into consideration constraints for personal agendas and transportation schedules. We have implemented a multi-agent recommender system that solves the problem. Building such applications implies to consider two main issues: collecting information from different sources on the Internet, and solving the prob...

In this paper, we study the problem of assigning indivisible items under the following constraints: 1) each item belongs to one of the p categories, 2) each agent is required to get exactly one item from each category, 3) no free disposal, and 4) no monetary transfer. We first characterize serial dictatorships by a minimal set of 3 properties: strategy-proofness, non-bossiness, and categorywise...

The availability of commodity multi-core andmulti-processor machinesandthe inherentparallelism inconstraintprogrammingsearchoffer significant opportunities for constraint programming.They also present a fundamental challenge: how to exploit parallelism transparently to speed upconstraintprograms.Thispaper showshowtoparallelize constraintprograms transparently without changes to the code. The ma...