Simple Distributed Filtering on a CLP Platform

I. Sakellariou, I. Vlahavas, “Simple Distributed Filtering on a CLP Platform”, 3rd Hellenic Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Companion Volume), G. Vouros and T. Panagiotopoulos (Eds.), pp. 318-327, 2004.

3rd Hellenic Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Companion Volume), G. Vouros and T. Panagiotopoulos (Eds.), pp. 318-327, 2004.

The area of distributed constraint satisfaction has drawn significant attention in the past decade. The approaches proposed in the area can be classified in two large categories: distributed search techniques and distributed filtering techniques. The work described in this paper concerns the CLP implementation of the DSAC algorithm, a novel distributed filtering technique that is based on the singleton consistency algorithm. The advantages of the algorithm include a high pruning efficiency and a remarkable simplicity. The latter allows an unproblematic implementation of the algorithm in any constraint programming platform that supports network communication, without the need of tampering with the (low level) consistency algorithm employed. The present paper briefly describes DSAC along with its implementation in the CSPCONS distributed CLP platform and presents experimental results on a number of structured constraint problems. The motivation behind this work is twofold: to support our argument concerning the simple implementation of the algorithm and to further investigate the benefits of its application to constraint satisfaction problems.