In this paper we propose a novel message-passing algorithm, the so-called Action-GDL, as an extension to the generalized distributive law (GDL) to ef¿ciently solve DCOPs. Action-GDL provides a unifying perspective of several dynamic programming DCOP algorithms that are based on GDL, such as DPOP and DCPOP algorithms. We empirically show how Action-GDL using a novel distributed post-processing heuristic can outperform DCPOP, and by extension DPOP, even when the latter uses the best arrangement provided by multiple state-of-the-art heuristics.Work funded by IEA (TIN2006-15662-C02-01), AT (CONSOLIDER CSD2007-0022, INGENIO 2010) and EVE (TIN2009-14702-C02-01 and 02). Vinyals is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education (FPU grant AP2006-04636)Peer Reviewe
