Asynchronous backtracking without adding links: A new member in the ABT family

Abstract

Following the pioneer work of Yokoo and colleagues on the ABT (asynchronous backtracking) algorithm, several ABT-based procedures have been proposed for solving distributed constraint networks. They differ in the way they store nogoods, but they all use additional communication links between unconnected agents to detect obsolete information. In this paper, we propose a new asynchronous backtracking algorithm which does not need to add links between initially unconnected agents. To make the description simpler and to facilitate the comparisons between algorithms, we present a unifying framework from which the new algorithm we propose, as well as existing ones, are derived. We provide an experimental evaluation of these algorithms. ©2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.