Alternating Target-Path Planning for Scalable Multi-Agent Coordination

Multi-robot systems are integral to modern logistics, but their capabilities are often limited to tasks executable by individual agents. This paper addresses a critical gap in existing frameworks like Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) and Task Allocation and Path Finding (TAPF), which lack true cooperation for transporting large items that require multiple agents. To this end, we formalise the Cooperative Transportation Task Allocation and Path Finding (CT-TAPF) problem, which integrates team formation, task assignment, and collision-free pathfinding. We present an optimal solver, Cooperative Transportation Task Conflict-Based Search (CT-TCBS), which features a novel Incremental Expansion strategy to tackle the combinatorial explosion inherent in team formation. Recognising the computational cost of optimality, we also develop a family of sub-optimal solvers that employ a global, task-centric perspective, selecting the next task to assign based on a global difficulty metric (Best Task or Worst Task). Our comprehensive empirical evaluation demonstrates three key findings: (1) the incremental expansion strategy significantly outperforms the naive combinatorial approach by successfully pruning the dominant task-allocation search space; (2) we identify a task-conflict expansion dilemma, where sophisticated conflict resolvers effective for large-agent pathfinding subproblems can be detrimental in the integrated CT-TAPF setting; and (3) our proposed sub-optimal solvers establish a new, more efficient frontier on the solution quality-runtime spectrum compared to "nn-" agent-centric baselines. This work provides a foundational framework and a set of effective algorithms for a new, practical class of cooperative multi-agent problems.

Many research fields share a common structure: a set of agents, each pursuing its own goal, whose actions must be coordinated so that no two of them conflict. Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) is a concrete instance of this structure, with applications from warehouses to road traffic and airports. Much of MAPF research assumes discrete time, circular agents sharing one spatial graph, a single goal per agent, and that an agent must remain at its goal once reached, precluding heterogeneous fleets, non-geometric conflicts, task sequences, and agents that move on after completing them. We generalise the MAPF formulation to lift these assumptions, and present Anytime-Optimal Continuous-time Conflict-Based Search (AOC-CBS), an exact and solution-complete solver for it. AOC-CBS guarantees the eventual return of an optimal solution, while reporting an incumbent with a known optimality gap upper bound throughout its runtime; it is configurable with a portfolio of repair functions, one of which we introduce (Tier-Prioritized Safe Interval Path Planning), and can exploit multiple processor cores. We demonstrate AOC-CBS on a mixed fleet of non-convex agents moving along smooth, kinodynamically feasible trajectories. Preliminary experiments against the exact solver OC-CBS, on well-known benchmarks and roadmaps we sample from them, show AOC-CBS is comparable at finding optimal solutions while extending scalability from the tens to the hundreds of agents when a bounded optimality gap is accepted.

Multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) is a widely used abstraction for multi-robot trajectory planning problems, where multiple homogeneous agents move simultaneously within a shared environment. Although solving MAPF optimally is NP-hard, scalable and efficient solvers are critical for real-world applications such as logistics and search-and-rescue. To this end, the research community has proposed various decentralized suboptimal MAPF solvers that leverage machine learning. Such methods frame MAPF (from a single agent perspective) as a Dec-POMDP where at each time step an agent has to decide an action based on the local observation and typically solve the problem via reinforcement learning or imitation learning. We follow the same approach but additionally introduce a learnable communication module tailored to enhance cooperation between agents via efficient feature sharing. We present the Local Communication for Multi-agent Pathfinding (LC-MAPF), a generalizable pre-trained model that applies multi-round communication between neighboring agents to exchange information and improve their coordination. Our experiments show that the introduced method outperforms the existing learning-based MAPF solvers, including IL and RL-based approaches, across diverse metrics in a diverse range of (unseen) test scenarios. Remarkably, the introduced communication mechanism does not compromise LC-MAPF's scalability, a common bottleneck for communication-based MAPF solvers.