Removing Redundant Messages in N-ary BnB-ADOPT

Abstract

This note considers how to modify BnB-ADOPT, a well-known algorithm for optimally solving distributed constraint optimization problems, with a double aim: (i) to avoid sending most of the redundant messages and (ii) to handle cost functions of any arity. Some of the messages exchanged by BnB-ADOPT turned out to be redundant. Removing most of the redundant messages increases substantially communication efficiency: the number of exchanged messages is ¿in most cases¿ at least three times fewer (keeping the other measures almost unchanged), and termination and optimality are maintained. On the other hand, handling n-ary cost functions was addressed in the original work, but the presence of thresholds makes their practical usage more complex. Both issues ¿removing most of the redundant messages and efficiently handling n-ary cost functions¿ can be combined, producing the new version BnB-ADOPT+. Experimentally, we show the benefits of this version over the original one.