Constraints and Agents

Research on constraints and agents is emerging at the intersection of the communities studying constraint computation and software agents. Constraint-based reasoning systems can be enhanced by using agents with multiple problem-solving approaches or diverse problem representations. The constraint computation paradigm can be used to model agent consultation, cooperation, and competition. An interesting theme in agent interaction, which is studied here in constraint-based terms, is confronting ignorance: the agent's own ignorance or its ignorance of other agents. On the one hand, agent behavior, for example, negotiation, can be modeled as constraint satisfaction and optimization. On the other hand, agents can be used to accomplish constraint satisfaction and optimization, for example, to solve distributed scheduling problems. Agents offer opportunities to apply the constraint computation paradigm and present challenges to extend the paradigm. Constraint computation provides a general ...