{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/accelerating-focal-search-in-multi-agent-path","title":"Accelerating Focal Search in Multi-Agent Path Finding with Tighter Lower Bounds","arxiv_id":"2503.03779","date":"2025-03-04","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yimin Tang","Zhenghong Yu","Jiaoyang Li","Sven Koenig"],"abstract":"Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) involves finding collision-free paths for multiple agents while minimizing a cost function--an NP-hard problem. Bounded suboptimal methods like Enhanced Conflict-Based Search (ECBS) and Explicit Estimation CBS (EECBS) balance solution quality with computational efficiency using focal search mechanisms. While effective, traditional focal search faces a limitation: the lower bound (LB) value determining which nodes enter the FOCAL list often increases slowly in early search stages, resulting in a constrained search space that delays finding valid solutions. In this paper, we propose a novel bounded suboptimal algorithm, double-ECBS (DECBS), to address this issue by first determining the maximum LB value and then employing a best-first search guided by this LB to find a collision-free path. Experimental results demonstrate that DECBS outperforms ECBS in most test cases and is compatible with existing optimization techniques. DECBS can reduce nearly 30% high-level CT nodes and 50% low-level focal search nodes. When agent density is moderate to high, DECBS achieves a 23.5% average runtime improvement over ECBS with identical suboptimality bounds and optimizations.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03779v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.03779v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"accelerating-focal-search-in-multi-agent-path","repo_url":"https://github.com/HarukiMoriarty/RUST-CBS","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"computational-efficiency","task_name":"Computational Efficiency"},{"task_slug":"multi-agent-path-finding","task_name":"Multi-Agent Path Finding"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"valid"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}