ICBS: Improved Conflict-Based Search Algorithm for Multi-Agent Pathfinding

Eli Boyarski, Ariel Felner, Roni Stern, Guni Sharon, David Tolpin, Oded Betzalel, Solomon Eyal Shimony

Abstract: Conflict-Based Search (CBS) and its enhancements, Meta-Agent CBS and bypassing conflicts are amongst the strongest newly introduced algorithms for Multi-Agent Path Finding. This paper introduces two new improvements to CBS and incorporates them into a coherent, improved version of CBS, namely ICBS. Experimental results show that each of these improvements further reduces the runtime over the existing CBS-based approaches. When all improvements are combined, an even larger improvement is achieved, producing state-of-the art results for a number of domains.