In distributed resource allocation a set of agents must assign their resources to a set of tasks. This problem arises in many real-world domains such as distributed sensor networks, disaster rescue, hospital scheduling and others. Despite the variety of approaches proposed for distributed resource allocation, a systematic formalization of the problem, explaining the different sources of difficulties, and a formal explanation of the strengths and limitations of key approaches is missing. We take a step towards this goal by proposing a formalization of distributed resource allocation that represents both dynamic and distributed aspects of the problem. We define four categories of difficulties of the problem. To address this formalized problem, the paper defines the notion of Dynamic Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problem (DyDCSP). The central contribution of the paper is a generalized mapping from distributed resource allocation to DyDCSP. This mapping is proven to correctly perform resource allocation problems of specific difficulty. This theoretical results is verified in practice by an implementation on a real-world distributed sensor network.
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