Multi-Agent Pathfinding with Continuous Time

Multi-Agent Pathfinding (MAPF) is the problem of finding paths for multiple agents such that every agent reaches its goal and the agents do not collide. Most prior work on MAPF were on grids, assumed agents' actions have uniform duration, and that time is discretized into timesteps. In this work, we propose a MAPF algorithm that do not assume any of these assumptions, is complete, and provides provably optimal solutions. This algorithm is based on a novel combination of Safe Interval Path Planning (SIPP), a continuous time single agent planning algorithms, and Conflict-Based Search (CBS). We analyze this algorithm, discuss its pros and cons, and evaluate it experimentally on several standard benchmarks.

Authors

• Anton Andreychuk AIRI, Moscow, Russia
• Konstantin Yakovlev
• Dor Atzmon Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Royal Holloway, University of London
• Roni Stern

Keywords

• Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Multi-agent Planning
• Heuristic Search and Game Playing: Heuristic Search