Learn all about Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF)
P. Surynek. Towards Optimal Cooperative Path Planning in Hard Setups through Satisfiability Solving. In Proceedings of the Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI), pages 564-576, 2012.
Abstract: A novel approach to cooperative path-planning is presented. A SAT solver is used not to solve the whole instance but for optimizing the makespan of a sub-optimal solution. This approach is trying to exploit the ability of state-of-the-art SAT solvers to give a solution to relatively small instance quickly. A sub-optimal solution to the instance is obtained by some existent method first. It is then submitted to the optimization process which decomposes it into small subsequences for which optimal solutions are found by a SAT solver. The new shorter solution is subsequently obtained as concatenation of optimal sub-solutions. The process is iterated until a fixed point is reached. This is the first method to produce near optimal solutions for densely populated environments; it can be also applied to domain-independent planning supposed that sub-optimal planner is available.