Distributed constraint satisfaction for coordinating and integrating a large-scale, heterogeneous enterprise

Market forces are continuously driving public and private organisations towards higher productivity, shorter process and production times, and fewer labour hours. To cope with these changes, organisations are adopting new organisational models of coordination and cooperation that increase their flexibility, consistency, efficiency, productivity and profit margins. In this thesis an organisational model of coordination and cooperation is examined using a real life example; the technical integration of a distributed large-scale project of an international physics collaboration. The distributed resource constraint project scheduling problem is modelled and solved with the methods of distributed constraint satisfaction. A distributed local search method, the distributed breakout algorithm (DisBO), is used as the basis for the coordination scheme. The efficiency of the local search method is improved by extending it with an incremental problem solving scheme with variable ordering. The scheme is implemented as central algorithm, incremental breakout algorithm (IncBO), and as distributed algorithm, distributed incremental breakout algorithm (DisIncBO). In both cases, strong performance gains are observed for solving underconstrained problems. Distributed local search algorithms are incomplete and lack a termination guarantee. When problems contain hard or unsolvable subproblems and are tightly or overconstrained, local search falls into infinite cycles without explanation. A scheme is developed that identifies hard or unsolvable subproblems and orders these to size. This scheme is based on the constraint weight information generated by the breakout algorithm during search. This information, combined with the graph structure, is used to derive a fail first variable order. Empirical results show that the derived variable order is 'perfect'. When it guides simple backtracking, exceptionally hard problems do not occur, and, when problems are unsolvable, the fail depth is always the shortest. Two hybrid algorithms, BOBT and BOBT-SUSP are developed. When the problem is unsolvable, BOBT returns the minimal subproblem within the search scope and BOBT-SUSP returns the smallest unsolvable subproblem using a powerful weight sum constraint. A distributed hybrid algorithm (DisBOBT) is developed that combines DisBO with DisBT. The distributed hybrid algorithm first attempts to solve the problem with DisBO. If no solution is available after a bounded number of breakouts, DisBO is terminated, and DisBT solves the problem. DisBT is guided by a distributed variable order that is derived from the constraint weight information and the graph structure. The variable order is incrementally established, every time the partial solution needs to be extended, the next variable within the order is identified. Empirical results show strong performance gains, especially when problems are overconstrained and contain small unsolvable subproblems.

Using the Breakout Algorithm to Identify Hard and Unsolvable Subproblems

Carlos Eisenberg, Boi Faltings

Local search algorithms have been very successful for solving constraint satisfaction problems (CSP). However, a major weakness has been that local search is unable to detect unsolvability and is thus not suitable for highly constrained or overconstrained problems. In this paper, we present a scheme where a local search algorithm, the breakout algorithm, is used to identify hard or unsolvable subproblems. This is used in two ways. The first to generate a fail-first variable order for a systematic backtrack search that proves unsolvability or solves the problem efficiently. The combination of the two methods is a complete algorithm. On randomly generated coloring problems, the method performs extremely well, in particular, for tightly and overconstrained CSPs. The second way of using the breakout algorithm is as a filter for identifying possibly unsolvable subproblems. We present an efficient algorithm that guarantees to find the smallest unsolvable subproblem by systematic search. The presented scheme is of great practical use as ideal failure analysis tool, which also supports the repair of a problem.

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)2003

A Multi-Agent System for Integrating a Large-Scale Project

Carlos Eisenberg, Boi Faltings

This paper presents a multiagent-system for integrating AL-ICE: a real-life, distributed, large-scale particle physics experiment of the LHC project at CERN. The work is concerned with solving the large-scale coordination problem using a distributed constraint satisfaction algorithm. We believe that until now, no such algorithm has successfully handled problems of this size. The developed algorithm is a local search algorithm, based on the distributed breakout algorithm and is extended by an incremental problem solving scheme combined with a variable ordering heuristic. By benchmark results we show the algorithm performs extremely well and outperforms the standard version by orders of magnitude. In addition, we develop a constraint based project planning ontology for the knowledge exchange amongst the AL-ICE subproject agents. By using domain variables and constraints for information exchange, ambiguities due to cultural differences are eliminated.

2003

Distributed Constraint Optimization

Thomas Léauté

Distributed Constraint Satisfaction (DisCSP) and Distributed Constraint Optimization (DCOP) are formal frameworks that can be used to model a variety of problems in which multiple decision-makers cooperate towards a common goal: from computing an equilibrium of a game, to vehicle routing problems, to combinatorial auctions. In this thesis, we independently address two important issues in such multi-agent problems: 1) how to provide strong guarantees on the protection of the privacy of the participants, and 2) how to anticipate future, uncontrollable events. On the privacy front, our contributions depart from previous work in two ways. First, we consider not only constraint privacy (the agents' private costs) and decision privacy (keeping the complete solution secret), but also two other types of privacy that have been largely overlooked in the literature: agent privacy, which has to do with protecting the identities of the participants, and topology privacy, which covers information about the agents' co-dependencies. Second, while previous work focused mainly on quantitatively measuring and reducing privacy loss, our algorithms provide stronger, qualitative guarantees on what information will remain secret. Our experiments show that it is possible to provide such privacy guarantees, while still scaling to much larger problems than the previous state of the art. When it comes to reasoning under uncertainty, we propose an extension to the DCOP framework, called DCOP under Stochastic Uncertainty (StochDCOP), which includes uncontrollable, random variables with known probability distributions that model uncertain, future events. The problem becomes one of making "optimal" offline decisions, before the true values of the random variables can be observed. We consider three possible concepts of optimality: minimizing the expected cost, minimizing the worst-case cost, or maximizing the probability of a-posteriori optimality. We propose a new family of StochDCOP algorithms, exploring the tradeoffs between solution quality, computational and message complexity, and privacy. In particular, we show how discovering and reasoning about co-dependencies on common random variables can yield higher-quality solutions.

EPFL2011

Distributed Constraint Optimization

Thomas Léauté

EPFL2011