The increasing cost tree search for optimal multi-agent pathfinding

  • Authors:

  • Guni Sharon;Roni Stern;Meir Goldenberg;Ariel Felner

  • Affiliations:

  • Information Systems Engineering Departement, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Ben-Gurion University, Be'er-Sheva, Israel;Information Systems Engineering Departement, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Ben-Gurion University, Be'er-Sheva, Israel;Information Systems Engineering Departement, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Ben-Gurion University, Be'er-Sheva, Israel;Information Systems Engineering Departement, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Ben-Gurion University, Be'er-Sheva, Israel

  • Venue:
  • IJCAI'11 Proceedings of the Twenty-Second international joint conference on Artificial Intelligence - Volume Volume One
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

We address the problem of optimal path finding for multiple agents where agents must not collide and their total travel cost should be minimized. Previous work used traditional single-agent search variants of the A* algorithm. We present a novel formalization for this problem which includes a search tree called the increasing cost tree (ICT) and a corresponding search algorithm that finds optimal solutions. We analyze this new formalization and compare it to the previous state-of-the-art A*-based approach. Experimental results on various domains show the benefits and drawbacks of this approach. A speedup of up to 3 orders of magnitude was obtained in a number of cases.