DUCT: An Upper Confidence Bound Approach to Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems

Abstract

The Upper Confidence Bounds (UCB) algorithm is a well-known near-optimal strategy for the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem. Its extensions to trees, such as the Upper Confidence Tree (UCT) algorithm, have resulted in good solutions to the problem of Go. This paper introduces DUCT, a distributed algorithm inspired by UCT, for solving Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOP). Bounds on the solution quality are provided, and experiments show that, compared to existing DCOP approaches, DUCT is able to solve very large problems much more efficiently, or to find significantly higher quality solutions.

Cite

Text

Ottens et al. "DUCT: An Upper Confidence Bound Approach to Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems." AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2012. doi:10.1609/AAAI.V26I1.8129

Markdown

[Ottens et al. "DUCT: An Upper Confidence Bound Approach to Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems." AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2012.](https://mlanthology.org/aaai/2012/ottens2012aaai-duct/) doi:10.1609/AAAI.V26I1.8129

BibTeX

@inproceedings{ottens2012aaai-duct,
  title     = {{DUCT: An Upper Confidence Bound Approach to Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems}},
  author    = {Ottens, Brammert and Dimitrakakis, Christos and Faltings, Boi},
  booktitle = {AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  year      = {2012},
  pages     = {528-534},
  doi       = {10.1609/AAAI.V26I1.8129},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/aaai/2012/ottens2012aaai-duct/}
}