When multiple agents are in a shared environment, there usually exist con­ straints among the possible actions of these agents. A distributed constraint satisfaction problem (distributed CSP) is a problem in which the goal is to find a consistent combination of actions that satisfies these inter-agent constraints. More specifically, a distributed CSP is a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) in which multiple agents are involved. A constraint satisfaction problem is a problem in which the goal is to find a consistent assignment of values to variables. Even though the definition of a CSP is very simple, a surprisingly wide variety of artificial intelligence (AI) problems can be formalized as CSPs. Therefore, the research on CSPs has a long and distinguished history in AI (Mackworth 1992; Dechter 1992; Tsang 1993; Kumar 1992). A distributed CSP is a CSP in which variables and constraints are distributed among multiple autonomous agents. Various application problems in Multi-agent Systems (MAS) that are concerned with finding a consistent combination of agent actions can he formalized as dis­ tributed CSPs. Therefore, we can consid( | Distributed Constraint Satisfaction by Makoto Yokoo, Paperback | Indigo Chapters