Dynamic Conflict Clustering with Lightweight Learning and Strategic Repair for Distributed Constraint Satisfaction

Raziyeh Moghaddas, Fabio Caraffini

Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problems (DCSPs) model distributed decision-making in multi-agent systems, where agents assign values to local variables while satisfying shared constraints. However, many DCSP solvers still rely on broad, repeated peer-to-peer communication and are largely reactive, with limited support for strategic coordination or learning. This increases communication overhead, can lead to stagnation, and reduces the success of hard instances. Hence, we propose Dynamic Conflict Clustering-Incomplete (DCC-Incomplete), a repair-based solver that combines conflict-centred decomposition, structured coordination, strategic repair, and lightweight learning for stagnation recovery. DCC-Incomplete groups the unsolved part of the problem into conflict clusters and restricts communication via a coordination layer to agents within the same conflict region. It also introduces memory-guided restart, enabling agents and clusters to pause, revise, and adapt repairs based on neighbouring conflict states. A thorough evaluation of DCC-Incomplete on distributed graph-colouring benchmarks with planted satisfying assignments shows that its memory-guided restart improves the…