POGEMA: A Benchmark Platform for Cooperative Multi-Agent Pathfinding

TL;DR

POGEMA is a comprehensive benchmarking platform designed for fair comparison of classical, learning-based, and hybrid multi-agent pathfinding methods, supporting evaluation, visualization, and standardized metrics.

Contribution

It introduces a unified framework with tools and protocols for benchmarking diverse multi-agent pathfinding approaches in a fair and systematic manner.

Findings

State-of-the-art methods are systematically compared using the platform.

The platform enables fair evaluation across different approaches.

Benchmark results highlight strengths and weaknesses of various methods.

Abstract

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has recently excelled in solving challenging cooperative and competitive multi-agent problems in various environments, typically involving a small number of agents and full observability. Moreover, a range of crucial robotics-related tasks, such as multi-robot pathfinding, which have traditionally been approached with classical non-learnable methods (e.g., heuristic search), are now being suggested for solution using learning-based or hybrid methods. However, in this domain, it remains difficult, if not impossible, to conduct a fair comparison between classical, learning-based, and hybrid approaches due to the lack of a unified framework that supports both learning and evaluation. To address this, we introduce POGEMA, a comprehensive set of tools that includes a fast environment for learning, a problem instance generator, a collection of predefined problem instances, a visualization toolkit, and a benchmarking tool for automated evaluation. We also introduce and define an evaluation protocol that specifies a range of domain-related metrics, computed based on primary evaluation indicators (such as success rate and path length), enabling a fair multi-fold comparison. The results of this comparison, which involves a variety of state-of-the-art MARL, search-based, and hybrid methods, are presented.