With the rapid development and wide application of the Internet technology, many problems of Artificial Intelligence, for example scheduling, planning, resource allocation etc., are formally distributed now, which turn into a kind of multi-agent system problems. Accordingly, the standard constraint satisfaction problems turn into distributed constraint satisfaction problems, which become the general architecture for resolving multi-agent system. This paper first briefly introduces the basic concepts of distributed CSPs, and then summarizes the basic and the improved algorithms. Their efficiency and performance are analyzed and the typical applications of distributed CSPs in recent years are discussed. Finally, this paper presents the extensions of the basic formalization and the research trends in this area. Recent related work indicates that the future work will focus on the theoretical research to present the solid theoretical foundation for the practical problems.