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arXiv · 2410.01798

Windowed MAPF with Completeness Guarantees

Rishi Veerapaneni·Muhammad Suhail Saleem·Jiaoyang Li·Maxim Likhachev
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Abstract

Traditional multi-agent path finding (MAPF) methods try to compute entire start-goal paths which are collision free. However, computing an entire path can take too long for MAPF systems where agents need to replan fast. Methods that address this typically employ a "windowed" approach and only try to find collision free paths for a small windowed timestep horizon. This adaptation comes at the cost of incompleteness; all current windowed approaches can become stuck in deadlock or livelock. Our main contribution is to introduce our framework, WinC-MAPF, for Windowed MAPF that enables completeness. Our framework uses heuristic update insights from single-agent real-time heuristic search algorithms as well as agent independence ideas from MAPF algorithms. We also develop Single-Step CBS (SS-CBS), an instantiation of this framework using a novel modification to CBS. We show how SS-CBS, which only plans a single step and updates heuristics, can effectively solve tough scenarios where existing windowed approaches fail.

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Rishi Veerapaneni, Muhammad Suhail Saleem, Jiaoyang Li, Maxim Likhachev. 2024-10-02. Windowed MAPF with Completeness Guarantees. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v39i22.34499

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