{"title":"Sparse Decision Diagrams for SAT-based Compilation of Multi-Agent Path Finding (Extended Abstract)","authors":"Pavel Surynek","doi":"10.1609/socs.v15i1.21798","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v15i1.21798","url":null,"abstract":"Multi-agent path finding (MAPF) represents a task of finding non-colliding paths for agents via which they can navigate from their initial positions to specified goal positions. Contemporary optimal solving algorithms include dedicated search-based methods, that solve the problem directly, and compilation-based algorithms that reduce MAPF to a different formalism for which an efficient solver exists. In this paper, we enhance the existing Boolean satisfiability-based (SAT) algorithm for MAPF via using sparse decision diagrams representing the set of candidate paths for each agent, from which the target Boolean encoding is derived, considering more promising paths before the less promising ones are taken into account. Suggested sparse diagrams lead to a smaller target Boolean formulae that can be constructed and solved faster while optimality guarantees of the approach are kept. Specifically, considering the candidate paths sparsely instead of considering them all makes the SAT-based approach more competitive for MAPF on large maps.","PeriodicalId":425645,"journal":{"name":"Symposium on Combinatorial Search","volume":"442 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116748283","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fast Traffic Assignment by Focusing on Changing Edge Flows (Extended Abstract)","authors":"A. Davoodi, M. Wallace, Daniel D. Harabor","doi":"10.1609/socs.v15i1.21781","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v15i1.21781","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a novel algorithm for solving the traffic assignment problem (TAP). Contrary to traditional algorithms, which use the one-to-all shortest path algorithm to solve the problem for all origin destinations (OD) pairs, this algorithm tracks the changes of the edges and (at certain iterations) solves the problem only for critical edges whose flows have changed substantially using a state-of-the-art edge p2p shortest path algorithm. When additionally, only OD pairs with larger flows are considered, this enhancement halves the time needed to optimize the solution with a very small error in a large-scale network.","PeriodicalId":425645,"journal":{"name":"Symposium on Combinatorial Search","volume":"421 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132833221","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Tianyi Gu, Wheeler Ruml, Shahaf S. Shperberg, E. Shimony, E. Karpas
{"title":"When to Commit to an Action in Online Planning and Search","authors":"Tianyi Gu, Wheeler Ruml, Shahaf S. Shperberg, E. Shimony, E. Karpas","doi":"10.1609/socs.v15i1.21755","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v15i1.21755","url":null,"abstract":"In online planning, search is concurrent with execution. Under the formulation of planning as heuristic search, when a planner commits to an action, it re-roots its search tree at the node representing the outcome of that action. For the system to remain controlled, the planner must commit to a new action (perhaps a no-op) before the previously chosen action completes. This time pressure results in a real-time search. In this time-bounded setting, it can be beneficial to commit early, in order to perform more lookahead search focused below an upcoming state. In this paper, we propose a principled method for making this commitment decision. Our experimental evaluation shows that our scheme can outperform previously-proposed fixed strategies.","PeriodicalId":425645,"journal":{"name":"Symposium on Combinatorial Search","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129918163","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On Producing Shortest Cost-Optimal Plans","authors":"Michael Katz, G. Röger, M. Helmert","doi":"10.1609/socs.v15i1.21757","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v15i1.21757","url":null,"abstract":"Cost-optimal planning is at the heart of planning research, with many existing planners that produce provably optimal solutions. While some applications pose additional restrictions, such as producing shortest (in the number of actions) among the cost-optimal plans, standard cost-optimal planning does not provide such a guarantee. We discuss two possible approaches to produce provably the shortest among the cost-optimal plans, one corresponding to an instantiation of cost-algebraic A∗, the other based on a cost transformation. We formally prove that the new cost-transformation method indeed produces the shortest among the cost-optimal plans and empirically compare the performance of the approaches in different configurations.","PeriodicalId":425645,"journal":{"name":"Symposium on Combinatorial Search","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115611742","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Meeting at the Border of Two Separate Domains","authors":"A. Tabacaru, Dor Atzmon, Ariel Felner","doi":"10.1609/socs.v15i1.21775","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v15i1.21775","url":null,"abstract":"To transmit information or transfer an object, two agents may need to reach the same location and meet. Often, such two agents operate in two separate environments and they can only meet at border locations. For example, a ship, sailing in the sea, needs to meet a truck traveling on land. These two agents are able to meet only at the shoreline. We call this problem the Meeting at the Border problem (MATB). In MATB, the optimal meeting location at the border is required, where the cost of a meeting location is the sum of the two shortest paths to that location. We show how to optimally solve MATB with heuristic search and suggest a novel heuristic function that estimates the cost of meeting at the border. Indeed, our new heuristic significantly enhances search algorithms in 2D and 3D domains.","PeriodicalId":425645,"journal":{"name":"Symposium on Combinatorial Search","volume":"213 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115948514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Combining Conflict-based Search and Agent-based Modeling for Evacuation Problems (Extended Abstract)","authors":"Kristýna Janovská, Pavel Surynek","doi":"10.1609/socs.v15i1.21790","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v15i1.21790","url":null,"abstract":"We address the problem of evacuation from the heuristic search perspective combined with agent-based modeling (ABM). The evacuation problem is modeled as a navigation of multiple agents in a known environment. The environment is divided into a danger and a safe zone while the task of agents is to move from the danger zone to the safe zone in a collision-free manner. Unlike previous approaches that model the environment as a discrete graph with agents placed in its vertices, at most one agent per vertex, our approach adopts various continuous aspects such as a grid-based embedding of the environment into 2D space and continuous line of sight of agents. In addition to this, we adopt hierarchical structure of our multi-agent system in which so called leading agents are more informed and are capable of performing multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) via centralized algorithms like conflict-based search (CBS) while so called following agents with limited knowledge about other agents are modeled using simple local rules. Our experimental evaluation indicates that suggested hierarchical modeling approach can serve as a tool for studying the progress and the efficiency of evacuation processes in different environments.","PeriodicalId":425645,"journal":{"name":"Symposium on Combinatorial Search","volume":"813 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132006552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Iterative-Deepening Uniform-Cost Heuristic Search","authors":"Zhaoxing Bu, R. Korf","doi":"10.1609/socs.v15i1.21748","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v15i1.21748","url":null,"abstract":"Breadth-first heuristic search (BFHS) is a classic algorithm for optimally solving heuristic search and planning problems. BFHS is slower than A* but requires less memory. However, BFHS only works on unit-cost domains. We propose a new algorithm that extends BFHS to domains with different edge costs, which we call uniform-cost heuristic search (UCHS). Experimental results show that the iterative-deepening version of UCHS, IDUCHS, is slower than A* but requires less memory on a variety of planning domains.","PeriodicalId":425645,"journal":{"name":"Symposium on Combinatorial Search","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131764582","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Shawn Skyler, Dor Atzmon, Ariel Felner, Oren Salzman, Han Zhang, Sven Koenig, W. Yeoh, Carlos Hernández Ulloa
{"title":"Bounded-Cost Bi-Objective Heuristic Search","authors":"Shawn Skyler, Dor Atzmon, Ariel Felner, Oren Salzman, Han Zhang, Sven Koenig, W. Yeoh, Carlos Hernández Ulloa","doi":"10.1609/socs.v15i1.21774","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v15i1.21774","url":null,"abstract":"There are many settings that extend the basic shortest path search problem. In Bounded-Cost Search, we are given a constant bound and the task is to find a solution within the bound. In Bi-Objective Search, each edge is associated with two costs (objectives) and the task is to minimize both objectives. In this paper, we combine both these settings into a new setting of Bounded-Cost Bi-Objective Search. We are given two bounds, one for each objective and the task is to find a solution within these bounds. We provide a scheme for normalizing the two objectives. We then introduce several algorithms for this new setting and compare them experimentally.","PeriodicalId":425645,"journal":{"name":"Symposium on Combinatorial Search","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121470492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Online Approach for Multi-Agent Path Finding Under Movement Uncertainty (Extended Abstract)","authors":"Elad Levy, Guy Shani, Roni Stern","doi":"10.1609/socs.v15i1.21792","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v15i1.21792","url":null,"abstract":"In this work, we address the problem of finding paths for multiple agents while avoiding collisions between them, where agents' actions have stochastic outcomes. \u0000The objective is to create a joint policy for all agents that minimize the expected sum of costs of getting all agents to their goals, while guaranteeing that collisions never occur. \u0000Unlike previous work on multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF), the stochastic outcomes are not limited to delays, and thus the set of locations each agent may end up at can be very large. \u0000Consequently, offline planning is prohibitively expensive since collisions between agents may occur in many locations and time steps, while avoiding them is a hard constraint. \u0000Instead, we propose a suboptimal online approach in which each agent follows its individually-optimal policy until it detected potential collisions in the future. Then, the potentially conflicting agents create a joint policy for resolving the potential collision. \u0000We evaluated this policy experimentally on existing an MAPF benchmark, modified to include stochasticity. The results show that we are able to find high quality solutions for non-trivial grids with up to 12 agents, significantly surpassing several baseline approaches.","PeriodicalId":425645,"journal":{"name":"Symposium on Combinatorial Search","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115063916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
L. Chrpa, Pavel Rytír, Andrii Nyporko, Rostislav Horcík, S. Edelkamp
{"title":"Effective Planning in Resource-Competition Problems by Task Decomposition","authors":"L. Chrpa, Pavel Rytír, Andrii Nyporko, Rostislav Horcík, S. Edelkamp","doi":"10.1609/socs.v15i1.21751","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v15i1.21751","url":null,"abstract":"Effective planning while competing for limited resources is crucial in many real-world applications such as on-demand transport companies competing for passengers. Planning techniques therefore have to take into account possible actions of an adversarial agent. Such a challenge that can be tackled by leveraging game-theoretical methods such as Double Oracle. \u0000\u0000This paper aims at the scalability issues arising from combining planning techniques with Double Oracle. In particular, we propose an abstraction-based heuristic for deciding how resources will be collected (e.g. which car goes for which passenger and in which order) and we propose a method for decomposing planning tasks into smaller ones (e.g. generate plans for each car separately). Our empirical evaluation shows that our proposed approach considerably improves scalability compared to the state-of-the-art techniques.","PeriodicalId":425645,"journal":{"name":"Symposium on Combinatorial Search","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122836654","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}