The Fourth International Workshop on
Distributed Constraint Reasoning

Instruction for authors: We will publish selected papers from the workshop (along with selected papers from IJCAI-03 Workshop on Agents and Automated Reasoning) in a volume in the book series Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications published by IOS Press. If you submitted a paper to the workshop, you are welcome to submit your final version to the volume. There will be a quick review for each submission.

• Deadline for submission: November 1, 2003
• Page limit: no longer than 15 pages
• Format: The latex template is here (a gziped tar file)
• Copyright information can be found on IOS Press webpage

The 4th International Workshop on Distributed Constraint Reasoning will be held in Acapulco, Mexico, on August 9, 2003.  The workshop is a part of the 18th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-2003, Acapulco, Mexico, August 9-15, 2003. 

Distributed Constraint Satisfaction problems arise when pieces of information about variables, constraints or both are relevant to independent but communicating agents.  They provide a promising framework to deal with the increasingly diverse range of distributed real world problems emerging from the fast evolution of communication technologies. 

The new challenges posed by solving Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problems are related to meeting resource restrictions, privacy requirements, exploiting opportunities for cooperation, and designing conflict resolution strategies. 

The workshop addresses modeling, formulation and solution of Distributed Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization Problems. Scientific issues to be discussed at the workshop include: 
 

• unified frameworks for distributed CSP 
• algorithms for solving distributed CSP 
• privacy issues in distributed CSP 
• negotiation among self-interested agents 
• distributed constraint propagation and consistency 
• over-constrained distributed CSP 
• generation and formulation/modeling of distributed CSP 
• phase transition in distributed CSP 
• applications of distributed CSP. 

Due to the technical advances in multi-agent systems, Distributed CSPs have become a technology that fits many real applications.  This workshop will provide an opportunity for researchers to continue progress towards a common understanding and framework in which the approach can be developed and brought into practice. The workshop is interesting for researchers in Constraint Satisfaction and/or Multi-Agents communities. 

Publication

Our intention is to invite authors to submit papers based on the work they presented after the conference for a joint publication with the Workshop on Agents and Automated Reasoning in an edited book (published possibly with Kluwer Academic publishers)

Tentative Schedule

8:30 - 8:35am Welcome by Weixiong Zhang

8:35 - 9:20am Benjamin Wah, Yixin Chen and Robert Morris (Featured talk)
Discrete-space Lagrangian optimization for multi-objective temporal planning

9:20 - 9:45am Roger Mailler and Victor Lesser
A mediation-based protocol for distributed constraint satisfaction

9:45 - 10:10pm Miguel Salido, Adriana Giret and Feberico Barber
Distributing constraints by sampling in non-binary CSPs

10:10 - 10:35am Pragnesh Jay Modi, Syed Muhannad Ali, Rishi Goel and Milind Tambe
Distributed constraint reasoning under unreliable communication

10:35 - 10:50am break

10:50 - 11:15am Carlos Eisenberg and Boi Faltings
A hybrid solving scheme for distributed constraint satisfaction problems

11:15 - 11:40am Marius-Calin Silaghi
Solving a distributed CSP with cryptographic multi-party computations, without revealing constraints and without involving trusted servers

11:40 - 12:05pm Vincent Conitzer and Tuomas Sandholm
Computing Shapley values, manipulating value division schemes, and checking core membership in multi-issue domains

12:05 - 1:30pm lunch

1:30 - 2:30pm Rina Dechter (Invited talk)
Distributed self-stabilizing algorithms for constraint satisfaction, revisited

2:30 - 2:55pm Adrian Petcu and Bio Faltings
Applying interchangeability techniques to the distributed breakout algorithm

2:55 - 3:20pm Lars Wittenburg and Weixiong Zhang
Constraint relaxation in distributed breakout algorithm for solving distributed constraint optimization problems

3:20- 3:40pm break

3:40 - 4:05pm Muhammad Arshad and Marius C. Silaghi
Distributed simulated annealing and comparison to DSA

4:05 - 4:30pm Boi Faltings and Santiago Macho-Gonzalez
Open constraint optimization

4:30 - 4:55pm Richard Wallace
Reasoning with possibilities in multiagent graph coloring

4:55 - 5:20pm break

5:20 - 5:45pm Marius-Calin Silaghi
Asynchronous PFC-MRDAC

5:45pm - Open Discussion, led by Boi Faltings

6:45pm? - informal workshop dinner

Submission Instructions

Do not forget to mention your contact address and e-mail or telephone (e.g. in a footnote on the title page). 

Important Dates and Deadlines

• Deadline for the submission of full papers (up to 15 pages): April 25, 2003. 
• Notification of acceptance/rejection: May 9, 2003. 
• Deadline for the receipt of camera-ready papers: May 23, 2003. 

Contact address or inquiry

Organizing Committee

Boi Faltings, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne 

Marius Silaghi, Florida Institute of Technology 

Makoto Yokoo, NTT Communication Science Laboratories 

Weixiong Zhang, Computer Science Department, Washington University