Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding in Large-Scale Warehouses - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding in Large-Scale Warehouses

Jiaoyang Li, Andrew Tinka, Scott Kiesel, Joseph W. Durham, T. K. Satish Kumar, and Sven Koenig
Conference Paper, Proceedings of 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI '21), pp. 11272 - 11281, February, 2021

Abstract

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is the problem of moving a team of agents to their goal locations without collisions. In this paper, we study the lifelong variant of MAPF, where agents are constantly engaged with new goal locations, such as in large-scale automated warehouses. We propose a new framework Rolling-Horizon Collision Resolution (RHCR) for solving lifelong MAPF by decomposing the problem into a sequence of Windowed MAPF instances, where a Windowed MAPF solver resolves collisions among the paths of the agents only within a bounded time horizon and ignores collisions beyond it. RHCR is particularly well suited to generating pliable plans that adapt to continually arriving new goal locations. We empirically evaluate RHCR with a variety of MAPF solvers and show that it can produce high-quality solutions for up to 1,000 agents (= 38.9\% of the empty cells on the map) for simulated warehouse instances, significantly outperforming existing work.

BibTeX

@conference{Li-2021-131398,
author = {Jiaoyang Li and Andrew Tinka and Scott Kiesel and Joseph W. Durham and T. K. Satish Kumar and Sven Koenig},
title = {Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding in Large-Scale Warehouses},
booktitle = {Proceedings of 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI '21)},
year = {2021},
month = {February},
pages = {11272 - 11281},
}