Non-Crossing Anonymous MAPF for Tethered Robots

XIAO PENG, Olivier Simonin, Christine Solnon

Abstract:

This paper describes a simple heuristic approach to solving large-scale
constraint satisfaction and scheduling problems. In this approach one
starts with an inconsistent assignment for a set of variables and
searches through the space of possible repairs. The search can be guided
by a value-ordering heuristic, the {\em min-conflicts heuristic}, that
attempts to minimize the number of constraint violations after each
step. The heuristic can be used with a variety of different search
strategies. We demonstrate empirically that on the $n$-queens problem,
a technique
based on this approach performs orders of magnitude better than
traditional backtracking techniques. We also describe a
scheduling application where the approach has been used successfully. A
theoretical analysis is presented both to explain why this method works
well on certain types of problems and to predict when it is likely to
be most effective.