Introducing Delays in Multi-Agent Path Finding

Justin Kottinger, Tzvika Geft, Shaull Almagor, Oren Salzman, Morteza Lahijanian

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

Abstract

We consider a Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) setting where agents have been assigned a plan, but during its execution some agents are delayed. Instead of replanning from scratch when such a delay occurs, we propose delay introduction, whereby we delay some additional agents so that the remainder of the plan can be executed safely. We show that finding the minimum number of additional delays is APXhard, i.e., it is NP-hard to find a (1 + ε)-approximation for some ε > 0. However, in practice we can find optimal delay-introductions using Conflict-Based Search for very large numbers of agents, and both planning time and the resulting length of the plan are comparable, and sometimes outperform the state-of-the-art heuristics for replanning.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)37-45
Number of pages9
JournalThe International Symposium on Combinatorial Search
Volume17
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024
Externally publishedYes
Event17th International Symposium on Combinatorial Search, SoCS 2024 - Kananaskis, Canada
Duration: 6 Jun 20248 Jun 2024

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications

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