Flow-Based Task Assignment for Large-Scale Online Multi-Agent Pickup and Delivery

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zhang, Yue, Chen, Zhe, Harabor, Daniel, Bodic, Pierre Le, Stuckey, Peter J.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Zhang, Yue
Chen, Zhe
Harabor, Daniel
Bodic, Pierre Le
Stuckey, Peter J.
author_facet Zhang, Yue
Chen, Zhe
Harabor, Daniel
Bodic, Pierre Le
Stuckey, Peter J.
contents We study the problem of online Multi-Agent Pickup and Delivery (MAPD), where a team of agents must repeatedly serve dynamically appearing tasks on a shared map. Existing online methods either rely on simple heuristics, which result in poor decisions, or employ complex reasoning, which suffers from limited scalability under real-time constraints. In this work, we focus on the task assignment subproblem and formulate it as a minimum-cost flow over the environment graph. This eliminates the need for pairwise distance computations and allows agents to be simultaneously assigned to tasks and routed toward them. The resulting flow network also supports efficient guide path extraction to integrate with the planner and accelerates planning under real-time constraints. To improve solution quality, we introduce two congestion-aware edge cost models that incorporate real-time traffic estimates. This approach supports real-time execution and scales to over 20000 agents and 30000 tasks within 1-second planning time, outperforming existing baselines in both computational efficiency and assignment quality.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_05890
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Flow-Based Task Assignment for Large-Scale Online Multi-Agent Pickup and Delivery
Zhang, Yue
Chen, Zhe
Harabor, Daniel
Bodic, Pierre Le
Stuckey, Peter J.
Multiagent Systems
We study the problem of online Multi-Agent Pickup and Delivery (MAPD), where a team of agents must repeatedly serve dynamically appearing tasks on a shared map. Existing online methods either rely on simple heuristics, which result in poor decisions, or employ complex reasoning, which suffers from limited scalability under real-time constraints. In this work, we focus on the task assignment subproblem and formulate it as a minimum-cost flow over the environment graph. This eliminates the need for pairwise distance computations and allows agents to be simultaneously assigned to tasks and routed toward them. The resulting flow network also supports efficient guide path extraction to integrate with the planner and accelerates planning under real-time constraints. To improve solution quality, we introduce two congestion-aware edge cost models that incorporate real-time traffic estimates. This approach supports real-time execution and scales to over 20000 agents and 30000 tasks within 1-second planning time, outperforming existing baselines in both computational efficiency and assignment quality.
title Flow-Based Task Assignment for Large-Scale Online Multi-Agent Pickup and Delivery
topic Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05890