Design-time decisions can often only cover certain scenarios and fail in efficiency when hard-to-predict system scenarios occur. This drives the development of run-time adaptive systems. To the best of our knowledge, we are presenting the first scheme for a runtime application mapping in a distributed manner using agents targeting for adaptive NoC-based heterogeneous multi-processor systems. Our approach reduces the overall traffic produced to collect the current state of the system (monitoring-traffic), needed for runtime mapping, compared to a centralized mapping scheme. In our experiment, we obtain 10.7 times lower monitoring traffic compared to the centralized mapping scheme proposed in [8] for a 64?64 NoC. Our proposed scheme also requires less execution cycles compared to a non-clustered centralized approach. We achieve on an average 7.1 times lower computational effort for the mapping algorithm compared to the simple nearest-neighbor (NN) heuristics proposed in [6] in a 64 ? 32...