SSP Group Meeting

11am, 1 March, 2005
Room 4.03, Appleton Tower
CISA, School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh

Constraint Relaxation in LCC

Fadzil Hassan

In providing coordination for distributed constraint solving of MAS through dialogue-based approach, the basic clause expansion mechanism of LCC has been extended to preserve the ranges of finite-domain constraints specified on variables. This allows agents to restrict rather than simply instantiate these constraints when interacting, thus allowing a less rigid interaction. However, brittleness of the protocol is still a problem especially when we are dealing with conflicting mutual finite-domain constraints specified by the distributed agents. Therefore, in this talk, our discussion is centred on how the constraint handling effort is implemented, starting from the existing work on maintaining the constraint space up to the further extension that include implementation of constraint relaxation coordination task.