Multi-Directional Search

Dor Atzmon, Jiaoyang Li, Ariel Felner, Eliran Nachmani, Shahaf S. Shperberg, Nathan R. Sturtevant, Sven Koenig

Abstract: In the Multi-Agent Meeting (MAM) problem, the task is to find a meeting location for multiple agents, as well as a path for each agent to that location. In this paper, we introduce MM*, a Multi-Directional Search algorithm that finds the optimal meeting location under different cost functions. MM* generalizes the Meet in the Middle (MM) bidirectional search algorithm to the case of finding optimal meeting locations for multiple agents. A number of admissible heuristics are proposed and experiments demonstrate the benefits of MM*.