Distributed problem solving

Abstract

Broadly, distributed problem solving is a subfield withinmultiagent systems, where the focus is to enable multipleagents to work together to solve a problem. These agents are often assumed to be cooperative, that is, they are part of a team or they are self-interested but incentives or disincentives have been applied such that the individual agent rewards are aligned with the team reward. We illustrate the motivations for distributed problem solving with an example. Imagine a decentralized channel-allocation problem in a wireless local area network (WLAN), where each access point (agent) in the WLAN needs to allocate itself a chan-nel to broadcast such that no two access points with overlap-ping broadcast regions (neighboring agents) are allocated the same channel to avoid interference. Figure 1 shows example mobile WLAN access points, where each access point is a Create robot fitted with a wireless CenGen radio card. Figure 2a shows an illustration of such a problem with three access points in a WLAN, where each oval ring represents the broadcast region of an access point. This problem can, in principle, be solved with a centralized approach by having each and every agent transmit all the rele-vant information, that is, the set of possible channels that the agent can allocate itself and its set of neighboring agents, to a centralized server. However, this centralized approach may incur unnecessary communication cost compared to a distrib