Distributed Meeting Schedule through Cooperative Mediation:
analysing OptAPO's performance in a complex scenario
Paulo R. Ferreira Jr. and Ana L. C. Bazzan

Abstract

In multiagent systems, Distributed Constraint Optimization Problem (DCOP) has been used as a formalism to model a wide range of agents  coordination issues. An approach based on cooperative me-diation was recently proposed as a new way to find the optimal solu-tion to DCOP. An important question about any solution to DCOP is whether it is fast enough to be applied in real-world applications, such as Distributed Meeting Scheduling problems. Here, we map the DMS as a DCOP, use cooperative mediation, and compare the performance of this approach with the results achieved by another algorithms for DCOP. Given the time complexity of the complete solutions, we propose a modified approach for the cooperative mediation, in which the idea is to trade the completeness of the search mechanism for the performance of a heuristic search, which yields a good solution in a feasible time.