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An improved DPOP algorithm based on breadth first search pseudo-tree for distributed constraint optimization

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Abstract

Depth First Search (DFS) pseudo-tree is popularly used as the communication structure in complete algorithms for solving Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs) from multiagent systems. The advantage of a DFS pseudo-tree lies in its parallelism derived from pseudo-tree branches because the nodes in different branches are relatively independent and can compute concurrently. However, the constructed DFS pseudo-trees in experiments often come to be chain-like and greatly impair the performances of solving algorithms. Therefore, we propose a new DPOP algorithm using a Breadth First Search (BFS) pseudo-tree as the communication structure, named BFSDPOP. Compared with a DFS pseudo-tree, a BFS pseudo-tree is more excellent on the parallelism as it has much more branches. Another notable advantage is that the height of a BFS pseudo-tree is much lower than that of a DFS pseudo-tree, which gives rise to the shorter communication paths and less communication time. The method of Cluster Removing is also presented to allocate cross-edge constraints to reduce the size of the largest message in BFSDPOP. In the experiment, BFSDPOP with a BFS pseudo-tree and original DPOP with a DFS pseudo-tree are compared on three types of problems - graph coloring problems, meeting scheduling problems and random DCOPs. The results show that BFSDPOP outperforms original DPOP in most cases, which proves the excellent attributes of BFS pseudo-tree over DFS pseudo-tree.

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Acknowledgments

This work is partly supported by Chongqing University Postgraduates’ Innovation Project (Project No. CYS14018), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central University of China (Project No. 106112013CDJZR180013) and the Postdoctoral Science Foundation of Chongqing in China (Project No. Xm201324).

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  1. College of Computer Science, Chongqing University, Chongqing, China

    Ziyu Chen, Zhen He & Chen He

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  1. Ziyu Chen
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Correspondence to Ziyu Chen.

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Chen, Z., He, Z. & He, C. An improved DPOP algorithm based on breadth first search pseudo-tree for distributed constraint optimization. Appl Intell 47, 607–623 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-017-0905-4

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