Analysis and Utilisation of Conflicts in Multi-Agent Path Finding

With the escalation in deployments of robotic fleets in unstructured environments, the need to address the increasing number of conflicts in Multi-Agent Path Finding also rises. We discuss the evident issue of conflicts and analyse their spatial relationships. A method to use previous missions and their resulting conflicts to extract highways is proposed. The highways facilitate a modified heuristic for Conflict Based Search allowing for fewer initial conflicts and thus decreasing the computational complexity of the search. The importance of the analysis of conflict patterns is displayed with real life experiments of a simulated assembly line workplace.