{"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/lifelong-multi-agent-path-finding-for-online","title":"Lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding for Online Pickup and Delivery Tasks","arxiv_id":"1705.10868","date":"2017-05-30","proceeding":null,"authors":["Hang Ma","Jiaoyang Li","T. K. Satish Kumar","Sven Koenig"],"abstract":"The multi-agent path-finding (MAPF) problem has recently received a lot of\nattention. However, it does not capture important characteristics of many\nreal-world domains, such as automated warehouses, where agents are constantly\nengaged with new tasks. In this paper, we therefore study a lifelong version of\nthe MAPF problem, called the multi-agent pickup and delivery (MAPD) problem. In\nthe MAPD problem, agents have to attend to a stream of delivery tasks in an\nonline setting. One agent has to be assigned to each delivery task. This agent\nhas to first move to a given pickup location and then to a given delivery\nlocation while avoiding collisions with other agents. We present two decoupled\nMAPD algorithms, Token Passing (TP) and Token Passing with Task Swaps (TPTS).\nTheoretically, we show that they solve all well-formed MAPD instances, a\nrealistic subclass of MAPD instances. Experimentally, we compare them against a\ncentralized strawman MAPD algorithm without this guarantee in a simulated\nwarehouse system. TP can easily be extended to a fully distributed MAPD\nalgorithm and is the best choice when real-time computation is of primary\nconcern since it remains efficient for MAPD instances with hundreds of agents\nand tasks. TPTS requires limited communication among agents and balances well\nbetween TP and the centralized MAPD algorithm.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1705.10868v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.10868v1.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":"lifelong-multi-agent-path-finding-for-online","repo_url":"https://github.com/ct2034/cobra","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"unanswered"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"multi-agent-path-finding","task_name":"Multi-Agent Path Finding"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1705.10868","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}