Clique Analysis and Bypassing in Continuous-Time Conflict-Based Search
This work addresses efficiency challenges in continuous-time MAPF for robotics and logistics, though it is incremental as it adapts existing methods to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of symmetry-breaking in continuous-time Multi-Agent Pathfinding (MAPF) by adapting and combining known enhancements like bypassing and biclique constraints for Continuous-Time Conflict-Based Search (CCBS), resulting in statistically significant performance improvements, such as solving problems for up to 10% or 20% more agents in the same amount of time on dense graphs.
While the study of unit-cost Multi-Agent Pathfinding (MAPF) problems has been popular, many real-world problems require continuous time and costs due to various movement models. In this context, this paper studies symmetry-breaking enhancements for Continuous-Time Conflict-Based Search (CCBS), a solver for continuous-time MAPF. Resolving conflict symmetries in MAPF can require an exponential amount of work. We adapt known enhancements from unit-cost domains for CCBS: bypassing, which resolves cost symmetries and biclique constraints which resolve spatial conflict symmetries. We formulate a novel combination of biclique constraints with disjoint splitting for spatial conflict symmetries. Finally, we show empirically that these enhancements yield a statistically significant performance improvement versus previous state of the art, solving problems for up to 10% or 20% more agents in the same amount of time on dense graphs.