Improved Heuristics for Multi-Agent Path Finding with Conflict-Based Search

Conflict-Based Search (CBS) and its enhancements are among the strongest algorithms for Multi-Agent Path Finding. Recent work introduced an admissible heuristic to guide the high-level search of CBS. In this work, we prove the limitation of this heuristic, as it is based on cardinal conflicts only. We then introduce two new admissible heuristics by reasoning about the pairwise dependencies between agents. Empirically, CBS with either new heuristic significantly improves the success rate over CBS with the recent heuristic and reduces the number of expanded nodes and runtime by up to a factor of 50.

Authors

• Jiaoyang Li Carnegie Mellon University
• Ariel Felner Computer and Information Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
• Eli Boyarski
• Hang Ma Simon Fraser University
• Sven Koenig University of California & Örebro University

Keywords

• Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Multi-agent Planning
• Heuristic Search and Game Playing: Combinatorial Search and Optimisation
• Heuristic Search and Game Playing: Heuristic Search
• Planning and Scheduling: Search in Planning and Scheduling