Abstract

C. Ge, H. Zhang, J. Li and S. Koenig. Cost Splitting for Multi-Objective Conflict-Based Search. In International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), pages 128-137, 2023.

Abstract: The Multi-Objective Multi-Agent Path Finding (MO-MAPF) problem is the problem of finding the Pareto-optimal frontier of collision-free paths for a team of agents while minimizing multiple cost metrics. Examples of such cost metrics include arrival times, travel distances, and energy consumption. In this paper, we focus on the Multi-Objective Conflict-Based Search (MO-CBS) algorithm, a state-of-the-art MO-MAPF algorithm. We show that the standard splitting strategy used by MO-CBS can lead to duplicate search nodes and hence can duplicate the search effort of MO-CBS. To address this issue, we propose two new splitting strategies for MO-CBS, namely cost splitting and disjoint cost splitting. Our theoretical results show that, when using either splitting strategy, MO-CBS maintains its completeness and optimality guarantees. Our experimental results show that disjoint cost splitting, our best splitting strategy, speeds up MO-CBS by up to two orders of magnitude and substantially improves its success rates in various settings.

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