Trading off solution cost for smaller runtime in DCOP search algorithms

  • Authors:
  • William Yeoh;Sven Koenig;Xiaoxun Sun

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA;University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA;University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - Volume 3
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Distributed Constraint Optimization (DCOP) is a key technique for solving multiagent coordination problems. Unfortunately, finding minimal-cost DCOP solutions is NP-hard. We therefore propose two mechanisms that trade off the solution costs of two DCOP search algorithms (ADOPT and BnB-ADOPT) for smaller runtimes, namely the Inadmissible Heuristics Mechanism and the Relative Error Mechanism. The solution costs that result from these mechanisms are bounded by a more meaningful quantity than the solution costs that result from the existing Absolute Error Mechanism since they both result in solution costs that are larger than minimal by at most a user-specified percentage. Furthermore, the Inadmissible Heuristics Mechanism experimentally dominates both the Absolute Error Mechanism and the Relative Error Mechanism for BnB-ADOPT and is generally no worse than them for ADOPT.