Towards A Complete Multi-Agent Pathfinding Algorithm For Large Agents

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel approach to multi-agent pathfinding for large agents, reducing it to pebble motion on graphs, and demonstrates improved empirical performance over existing solvers on complex scenarios.

Contribution

It proposes a reduction of large-agent MAPF to pebble motion on graphs and presents a variant of the algorithm that handles large agents more effectively.

Findings

The new algorithm solves more large-agent MAPF instances within time limits.

It outperforms the state-of-the-art CCBS solver on complex non-planar graphs.

Empirical results show increased effectiveness in handling large agents.

Abstract

Multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) is a challenging problem which is hard to solve optimally even when simplifying assumptions are adopted, e.g. planar graphs (typically -- grids), discretized time, uniform duration of move and wait actions etc. On the other hand, MAPF under such restrictive assumptions (also known as the Classical MAPF) is equivalent to the so-called pebble motion problem for which non-optimal polynomial time algorithms do exist. Recently, a body of works emerged that investigated MAPF beyond the basic setting and, in particular, considered agents of arbitrary size and shape. Still, to the best of our knowledge no complete algorithms for such MAPF variant exists. In this work we attempt to narrow this gap by considering MAPF for large agents and suggesting how this problem can be reduced to pebble motion on (general) graphs. The crux of this reduction is the procedure that moves away the agents away from the edge which is needed to perform a move action of the current agent. We consider different variants of how this procedure can be implemented and present a variant of the pebble motion algorithm which incorporates this procedure. Unfortunately, the algorithm is still incomplete, but empirically we show that it is able to solve much more MAPF instances (under the strict time limit) with large agents on arbitrary non-planar graphs (roadmaps) compared to the state-of-the-art MAPF solver -- Continous Conflict-Based Search (CCBS).