Social Laws for Multi-Agent Pathfinding

Jan Slezák, Jakub Mestek, Roman Barták

Abstract: Multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) is the problem of finding collision-free plans for navigating a set of agents from their starting positions to their destinations. Frequently, rigid plans for all agents are centrally searched and perfect execution of actions is assumed, which raises issues with the uncertainty and the dynamicity of the environment. Social laws are a well-established paradigm in multi-agent systems to coordinate agents that avoid extensive negotiation. In this work, we present a decentralized online algorithm to solve the MAPF problem without the need for communication between agents. This approach uses social laws inspired by traffic rules.