Conflict-Based Search for Multi-Agent Path Finding with Elevators
🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the challenge of multi-agent pathfinding in multi-floor environments with elevators, where elevator contention often leads to planning conflicts. It introduces, for the first time, elevator scheduling into the multi-agent pathfinding problem (MAPF-E) and proposes an extended Conflict-Based Search (CBS) framework. The approach jointly models agent positions and elevator states, incorporating a cross-floor constraint handling mechanism along with elevator-aware conflict detection and resolution strategies. Experimental results demonstrate that the method efficiently generates conflict-free paths in significantly larger state spaces, substantially improving coordination efficiency and scalability of multi-agent systems in vertical transportation environments.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
This paper investigates a problem called Multi-Agent Path Finding with Elevators (MAPF-E), which seeks conflict-free paths for multiple agents from their start to goal locations that may locate on different floors, and the agents can use elevators to travel between floors. The existence of elevators complicates the interaction among the agents and introduces new challenges to the planning. On the one hand, elevators can cause many conflicts among the agents due to its relatively long traversal time across floors, especially when many agents need to reach a different floor. On the other hand, the planner has to reason in a larger state space including the states of the elevators, besides the locations of the agents.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Multi-Agent Path Finding
Elevators
Conflict-Free Paths
State Space
Floor Transition
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Multi-Agent Path Finding
Elevators
Conflict-Based Search
State Space Expansion
Inter-floor Planning
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