Windowed MAPF with Completeness Guarantees

Traditional multi-agent path finding (MAPF) methods try to compute entire start-goal paths which are collision free. However, computing an entire path can take too long for MAPF systems where agents need to replan fast. Methods that address this typically employ a "windowed" approach and only try to find collision free paths for a small windowed timestep horizon. This adaptation comes at the cost of incompleteness; all current windowed approaches can become stuck in deadlock or livelock. Our main contribution is to introduce our framework, WinC-MAPF, for Windowed MAPF that enables completeness. Our framework uses heuristic update insights from single-agent real-time heuristic search algorithms as well as agent independence ideas from MAPF algorithms. We also develop Single-Step CBS (SS-CBS), an instantiation of this framework using a novel modification to CBS. We show how SS-CBS, which only plans a single step and updates heuristics, can effectively solve tough scenarios where existing windowed approaches fail.

@article{veerapaneni2025_2410.01798,
  title={ Windowed MAPF with Completeness Guarantees },
  author={ Rishi Veerapaneni and Muhammad Suhail Saleem and Jiaoyang Li and Maxim Likhachev },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.01798},
  year={ 2025 }
}