Open Constraint Optimization

Constraint satisfaction has been applied with great success in closed-world scenarios, where all options and constraints are known from the beginning and fixed. With the internet, many of the traditional CSP applications in resource allocation, scheduling and planning pose themselves in open-world settings, where options and constraints must be gathered from different agents in a network. We define open constraint optimization as a model of such tasks. Under the assumption that options are discovered in decreasing order of preference, it becomes possible to guarantee optimality even when domains and constraints are not completely known. We propose several algorithms for solving open constraint optimization problems by incrementally gathering options through the network. We report empirical results on their performance on random problems, and analyze how to achieve optimality with a minimal number of queries to the information sources.