Publication

R. Veerapaneni, M. S. Saleem, J. Li and M. Likhachev. Windowed MAPF with Completeness Guarantees. In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pages (in print), 2025.

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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