Feasibility Study: Using Bypass Directly in Structured Warehouse for Multi-Agent Path Finding
Sen Xu, Kai Zhao
AI summary
Problem
Corridor conflicts in structured warehouses cause exponential search overhead and timeouts in standard MAPF algorithms, while existing guidance techniques lack adaptability or yield poor solution quality.
Approach
The authors integrate 'Reversible Lanes' into Conflict-Based Search, dynamically detecting corridor conflicts and imposing directional obstacle constraints to force agents onto bypass paths for resolution.
Key results
- Dynamic directional obstacle constraints resolve corridor conflicts online without complex preprocessing
- Theoretical proof shows the method's solution space strictly encompasses that of fixed highway designs
- Achieves a superior trade-off between solution quality and runtime compared to corridor reasoning and highway baselines
- Delivers near-optimal paths with significantly reduced computational overhead on dense warehouse maps
Why it matters
Provides a practical, adaptive pathfinding strategy that can directly improve throughput and reduce latency in automated warehouse logistics systems.
Abstract
In warehouse environments, corridor conflicts of- ten lead to traffic congestion, which result in many Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) algorithms failing to find solutions within a reasonable time limit. Previous works have studied using corridor reasoning techniques or incorporating guidance, such as highways, to address this problem. However, these approaches often either encounter timeouts or yield low-quality solutions. In this work, based on Conflict-Based Search (CBS), we propose a technique called Reversible Lanes, specifically designed to address corridor conflicts by imposing a new constraint that forces agents to use bypasses for conflict resolution. Our approach is motivated by three key observations from prior research: (1) in warehouse maps, the overhead associated with maintaining solution optimality via corridor reasoning techniques is often disproportionate to the benefits gained; (2) the fixed nature of manually designed highways exhibits a lack of adaptability, leading to poor solution quality on certain instances; and (3) the structural properties of warehouse layouts render direct bypass usage feasible and incur minimal additional costs. Theoretically, we demonstrate the feasibility of our algorithm by analyzing its relationship to both corridor reasoning techniques and highways. Experimentally, the results show that our algorithm provides a more effective approach for resolving corridor conflicts compared to these existing methods, achieving a superior trade-off between solution quality and computational efficiency by finding near-optimal solutions with reduced runtime.