{"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/scalable-multi-agent-reinforcement-learning-3","title":"Scalable Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Warehouse Logistics with Robotic and Human Co-Workers","arxiv_id":"2212.11498","date":"2022-12-22","proceeding":null,"authors":["Aleksandar Krnjaic","Raul D. Steleac","Jonathan D. Thomas","Georgios Papoudakis","Lukas Schäfer","Andrew Wing Keung To","Kuan-Ho Lao","Murat Cubuktepe","Matthew Haley","Peter Börsting","Stefano V. Albrecht"],"abstract":"We consider a warehouse in which dozens of mobile robots and human pickers work together to collect and deliver items within the warehouse. The fundamental problem we tackle, called the order-picking problem, is how these worker agents must coordinate their movement and actions in the warehouse to maximise performance in this task. Established industry methods using heuristic approaches require large engineering efforts to optimise for innately variable warehouse configurations. In contrast, multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) can be flexibly applied to diverse warehouse configurations (e.g. size, layout, number/types of workers, item replenishment frequency), and different types of order-picking paradigms (e.g. Goods-to-Person and Person-to-Goods), as the agents can learn how to cooperate optimally through experience. We develop hierarchical MARL algorithms in which a manager agent assigns goals to worker agents, and the policies of the manager and workers are co-trained toward maximising a global objective (e.g. pick rate). Our hierarchical algorithms achieve significant gains in sample efficiency over baseline MARL algorithms and overall pick rates over multiple established industry heuristics in a diverse set of warehouse configurations and different order-picking paradigms.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.11498v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2212.11498v3.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":"scalable-multi-agent-reinforcement-learning-3","repo_url":"https://github.com/uoe-agents/task-assignment-robotic-warehouse","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"multi-agent-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2212.11498","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2212.11498"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/uoe-agents/task-assignment-robotic-warehouse","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_fixture":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"d99ad04d6b0e55ff","entry":"info_statistics","repo":"uoe-agents/task-assignment-robotic-warehouse","repo_kind":"official","path":"scripts/run_heuristic.py","file_url":"https://github.com/uoe-agents/task-assignment-robotic-warehouse/blob/HEAD/scripts/run_heuristic.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_fixture","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"RAISES","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"d99ad04d6b0e55ff"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}