CTS-PLL: A Robust and Anytime Framework for Collaborative Task Sequencing and Multi-Agent Path Finding
This addresses the problem of efficient and collision-free multi-agent task sequencing for robotics applications, representing an incremental improvement over prior methods.
The paper tackles the Collaborative Task Sequencing and Multi-Agent Path Finding (CTS-MAPF) problem by introducing CTS-PLL, a hierarchical framework with enhancements for robustness and anytime refinement, achieving higher success rates and solution quality in benchmarks compared to existing methods.
The Collaborative Task Sequencing and Multi-Agent Path Finding (CTS-MAPF) problem requires agents to accomplish sequences of tasks while avoiding collisions, posing significant challenges due to its combinatorial complexity. This work introduces CTS-PLL, a hierarchical framework that extends the configuration-based CTS-MAPF planning paradigm with two key enhancements: a lock agents detection and release mechanism leveraging a complete planning method for local re-planning, and an anytime refinement procedure based on Large Neighborhood Search (LNS). These additions ensure robustness in dense environments and enable continuous improvement of solution quality. Extensive evaluations across sparse and dense benchmarks demonstrate that CTS-PLL achieves higher success rates and solution quality compared with existing methods, while maintaining competitive runtime efficiency. Real-world robot experiments further demonstrate the feasibility of the approach in practice.