Title Including Soft Global Constraints in DCOPs Publication Type Conference Paper Year of Publication 2012 Authors Bessière C, Gutierrez P, Meseguer P Conference Name 18th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2012) Conference Location Québec, Canada Date Published 08/10/2012 Abstract In the centralized context, global constraints have been essential for the advancement of constraint reasoning. In this paper we propose to include soft global constraints in distributed constraint optimization problems (DCOPs). Looking for efficiency, we study possible decompositions of global constraints, including the use of extra variables. We extend the distributed search algorithm BnB-ADOPT$^+$ to support these representations of global constraints. In addition, we explore the relation of global constraints with soft local consistency in DCOPs, in particular for the generalized soft arc consistency (GAC) level. We include specific propagators for the \emph{soft-all-different} and the \emph{soft-at-most} constraint and measure their impact in the solving process, providing empirical results on several benchmarks.