Abstract
We consider the problem of planning paths of multiple agents in a dynamic but predictable environment. Typical scenarios are evacuation, reconfiguration, and containment. We present a novel representation of abstract path-planning problems in which the stationary environment is explicitly coded as a graph (called the arena) while the dynamic environment is treated as just another agent. The complexity of planning using this representation is pspace-complete. The arena complexity (i.e., the complexity of the planning problem in which the graph is the only input, in particular, the number of agents is fixed) is np-hard. Thus, we provide structural restrictions that put the arena complexity of the planning problem into ptime(for any fixed number of agents). The importance of our work is that these structural conditions (and hence the complexity results) do not depend on graph-theoretic properties of the arena (such as clique- or tree-width), but rather on the abilities of the agents.
This work has been partially supported by the FP7 EU project 600958-SHERPA and the ERC Advanced Grant “RACE” (291528) at Oxford. Sasha Rubin is a Marie Curie fellow of the Istituto Nazionale di Alta Matematica.
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Murano, A., Perelli, G., Rubin, S. (2015). Multi-agent Path Planning in Known Dynamic Environments. In: Chen, Q., Torroni, P., Villata, S., Hsu, J., Omicini, A. (eds) PRIMA 2015: Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems. PRIMA 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9387. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25524-8_14
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