Following the pioneer work of Yokoo and colleagues on the ABT (asynchronous backtracking) algorithm, several ABT-based procedures have been proposed for solving distributed constraint networks. They differ in the way they store nogoods, but they all use additional communication links between unconnected agents to detect obsolete information. In this paper, we propose a new asynchronous backtracking algorithm which does not need to add links between initially unconnected agents. To make the description simpler and to facilitate the comparisons between algorithms, we present a unifying framework from which the new algorithm we propose, as well as existing ones, are derived. We provide an experimental evaluation of these algorithms.

In the scope of distributed constraint reasoning, the main algorithms presented so far have a feature in common: the addition of links between previously unrelated agents, before or during search. Our work presents a new search procedure for finding a solution in a distributed constraint satisfaction problem. This algorithm makes use of some of the good properties of centralized dynamic backtracking. It is sound, complete and allows a high level of asynchronism by sidestepping the unnecessary addition of links.