Abstract
This paper introduces a negotiation approach to solve the Multi-Agent Path Finding problem. The approach aims to achieve a good trade-off between the privacy of the agents and the effectiveness of solutions. Accordingly, a token-based bilateral negotiation protocol and a compatible negotiation strategy are presented. The proposed approach is evaluated in a variety of scenarios by comparing it with state-of-the-art centralized approaches such as Conflict Based Search and its variant. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach can find conflict-free path solutions with a higher success rate, especially when the search space is large and high-density compared to centralized approaches while the gap between path cost differences is reasonably low. The proposed approach enables agents to have their autonomy; thus, it is convenient for MAPF problems involving self-interested agents.
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Eran, C., Keskin, M.O., Cantürk, F., Aydoğan, R. (2021). A Decentralized Token-Based Negotiation Approach for Multi-Agent Path Finding. In: Rosenfeld, A., Talmon, N. (eds) Multi-Agent Systems. EUMAS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12802. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82254-5_16
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