{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"The Increasing Cost Tree Search for Optimal Multi-Agent Pathfinding","authors":[{"name":"Guni Sharon","slug":"guni-sharon","given":"Guni","family":"Sharon","affiliation":""},{"name":"Roni Stern","slug":"roni-stern","given":"Roni","family":"Stern","affiliation":""},{"name":"Mark Goldenberg","slug":"mark-goldenberg","given":"Mark","family":"Goldenberg","affiliation":""},{"name":"Ariel Felner","slug":"ariel-felner","given":"Ariel","family":"Felner","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"We address the problem of optimal path finding for multiple agents where agents must not collide and their total travel cost should be minimized. Previous work used traditional single-agent search variants of the A* algorithm. We present a novel formalization for this problem which includes a search tree called the increasing cost tree (ICT) and a corresponding search algorithm that finds optimal solutions. We analyze this new formalization and compare it to the previous state-of-the-art A*-based approach. Experimental results on various domains show the benefits and drawbacks of this approach. A speedup of up to 3 orders of magnitude was obtained in a number of cases.","doi":"10.5591/978-1-57735-516-8/IJCAI11-117","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2011/117","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2011/0117.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2011/117.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2011/bibtex/117","volume":{"slug":"2011","title":"Proceedings of the Twenty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2011","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2011/","year":2011,"location":"Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain","dates":"16–22 July 2011","editors":"Toby Walsh","isbn":"978-1-57735-512-0; 978-1-57735-513-7; 978-1-57735-514-4; 978-1-57735-515-1; 978-1-57735-516-8","publisher":"AAAI Press/International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence","doi_prefix":""},"section":null,"track":"","number":117,"pages":{"first":662,"last":666},"keywords":[],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}