Efficient Data Structures for Decision Diagrams

Dynamic Programming OPtimization (DPOP) is an algorithm proposed for solving distributed constraint optimization problems. In this algorithm, Hypercubes are used as the format of the messages exchanged between the agents. Then, Hybrid-DPOP (H-DPOP), a hybrid algorithm based on DPOP was proposed as an improved solution. Its main advantage over DPOP lies under the use of Multi-valued Decision Diagrams (MDDs) instead of Hypercubes. Furthermore, MDDs give a more compact representation of the messages. The MDDs were implemented and presented in by Kumar even though it was presented as Constrained Decision Diagrams (CDD) which is a generalization of MDDs. The first part of this project aims at implementing Hypercubes. An Implementation already exists. Therefore, the goal is to propose an implementation which is more efficient in term of speed and memory usage for the already implemented functions (join, project and slice). The solution implemented during this project should also provide new functions (split and re-order) and the possibility of saving Hypercubes in the XML format. The second part of the project consists in proposing and implementing a data structure that is more efficient than the MDDs implemented in H-DPOP. This data structure should also provide more functions, and also provide the possibility of saving data in the XML format.