English

Decentralized Monte Carlo Tree Search for Partially Observable Multi-agent Pathfinding

Artificial Intelligence 2023-12-27 v1 Machine Learning Multiagent Systems

Abstract

The Multi-Agent Pathfinding (MAPF) problem involves finding a set of conflict-free paths for a group of agents confined to a graph. In typical MAPF scenarios, the graph and the agents' starting and ending vertices are known beforehand, allowing the use of centralized planning algorithms. However, in this study, we focus on the decentralized MAPF setting, where the agents may observe the other agents only locally and are restricted in communications with each other. Specifically, we investigate the lifelong variant of MAPF, where new goals are continually assigned to the agents upon completion of previous ones. Drawing inspiration from the successful AlphaZero approach, we propose a decentralized multi-agent Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) method for MAPF tasks. Our approach utilizes the agent's observations to recreate the intrinsic Markov decision process, which is then used for planning with a tailored for multi-agent tasks version of neural MCTS. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art learnable MAPF solvers. The source code is available at https://github.com/AIRI-Institute/mats-lp.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2312.15908,
  title  = {Decentralized Monte Carlo Tree Search for Partially Observable Multi-agent Pathfinding},
  author = {Alexey Skrynnik and Anton Andreychuk and Konstantin Yakovlev and Aleksandr Panov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.15908},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

The paper is accepted to AAAI-2024 conference

R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:01:51.773Z