Learn all about Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF)
K. Janovska and P. Surynek. Hierarchical Control of Swarms during Evacuation. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (KEOD), pages 61-73, 2021.
Abstract: The problem of evacuation is addressed from the perspective of agent-based modeling (ABM) in this paper. We study evacuation as a problem of navigation of multiple agents in a known environment. The environment is divided into a danger and a safe zone while the task of agents is to move from the danger zone to the safe one. Unlike previous approaches that model the environment as a discrete graph with agents placed in its vertices our approach adopts various continuous aspects such as grid-based embedding of the environment into 2D space continuous line of sight of an agent. In addition to this, we adopt hierarchical structure of multi-agent system in which so called leading agents are more informed and are capable of performing multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) via centralized algorithms like conflict-based search (CBS) while so called follower agents are modeled using simple local rules. Our experimental evaluation indicates that suggested modeling approach can serve as a tool for studying the progress and the efficiency of the evacuation process.