English

Alternating Target-Path Planning for Scalable Multi-Agent Coordination

Artificial Intelligence 2026-05-13 v2

Abstract

The concurrent target assignment and pathfinding (TAPF) problem extends multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) by asking planners to allocate distinct targets and collision-free paths to agents. Prior work on TAPF has relied exclusively on Conflict-Based Search (CBS), which tightly couples target assignment and pathfinding, resulting in compute-intensive, non-scalable solutions. In contrast, we propose an iterative refinement framework that decouples target assignment from pathfinding. Our framework builds on modern, fast, suboptimal MAPF solvers, such as LaCAM. Specifically, within a given time budget, it repeatedly solves MAPF for the current target assignment, identifies bottleneck agents via MAPF feedback, and refines the assignment. Empirical results show that feedback-driven reassignment loop is effective, enabling our framework to scale well beyond the reach of the state-of-the-art CBS-based solver while maintaining decent solution quality. This represents a solid step toward practical, large scale TAPF suitable for real-world setups.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.07744,
  title  = {Alternating Target-Path Planning for Scalable Multi-Agent Coordination},
  author = {Yu Kumagai and Keisuke Okumura},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.07744},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:57:46.552Z