Abstract: Constraint satisfaction problems formalism offers a powerful frame of knowledge representation that can solve many problems. But constraint satisfaction problems are often NP-hard problems,so it's very important to using decomposition to reduce the costs of computation. This paper mainly described the importance of the decomposition in constraint satisfaction problems, several classic decomposition technologies and history of decomposition, and then analyzed these technologies. We introduced several new technologies of decomposition and analyzed them, then made a summary. We proposed our next research ideas and direction according to the problems in these technologies.

Key words: Constraint satisfaction problems,Decomposition technology,Knowledge representation frame