Authors:
Roland Kaminski
1
;
Torsten Schaub
1
;
Klaus Strauch
1
and
Jiří Švancara
2
Affiliations:
1
University of Potsdam, Germany
;
2
Charles University, Czech Republic
Keyword(s):
Multi-Agent Pathfinding, Sum of Costs, Reduction-Based Algorithm.
Abstract:
Multi-agent pathfinding is the task of guiding a group of agents through a shared environment while preventing collisions. This problem is highly relevant in various real-life scenarios, such as warehousing, robotics, navigation, and computer games. Depending on the context in which the problem is applied, we may have specific criteria for the quality of a solution, expressed as a cost function. The most common cost functions are the makespan and sum-of-cost. Minimizing either of them is computationally challenging, leading to the development of numerous approaches for solving multi-agent pathfinding. In this paper, we explore reduction-based solving under the sum-of-cost objective. We introduce a reduction to answer set programming (ASP) using two existing approaches for sum-of-cost minimization, originally introduced for a reduction to Boolean satisfiability (SAT). We propose several enhancements and use the Clingo ASP system to implement them. Experiments show that these enhanceme
nts significantly improve performance. Particularly, the performance on larger maps increases in comparison to the original variants.
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