4 agents found paths using Chi-Push-and-Swap and
then parallel ChiBOX in 13 steps, while in original
BiBOX a sequential path was found with 15 steps.
Therefore Push-and-Swap and parallel ChiBOX are
able to find a shorter path compared to BiBOX.
As the same clusters may in reality be connected
by more than one edge in different vertex, redundant
edges are ignored in the input of Chi-Push-and-Swap.
Preferable edges to preserve are those which connect
higher-degree vertices in the original graph.
Another advantage of this approach is the way
loops are created. In the original graph, 7 loops
were created for BiBOX, including the original cy-
cle. However due to the spectral decomposition, only
4 loops were necessary - one original cycle per bi-
connected component. Therefore this approach may
aid in simplifying loop decompositions.
6 DISCUSSION AND
CONCLUSION
We proposed a novel approach for the rule-based al-
gorithms for multi-agent path finding. We first de-
compose the input graph into highly connected com-
ponents via the spectral clustering method, a numeric
method based on calculation of eigenvalues of the ad-
jacency matrix of the input graph. Then agents are
moved to their goal clusters and after this the specific
rule-based algorithm is executed on individual clus-
ters to move agents to their goal vertices within the
cluster. We implemented this new method on top of
the BiBOX and Push-and-Swap algorithms, we call
the new variants ChiBOX and Chi-Push-and-Swap.
Our preliminary experiments indicate that the new
methods are promising and can produce solutions that
are better in the term of the number of moves than
if the rule-based algorithm is applied directly on the
unprocessed input graph.
For future work we plan to fine tune the spectral
clustering method to produce clusters that are suitable
for specific rule-based algorithms.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research at the Czech Technical University in
Prague has been supported by GA
ˇ
CR - the Czech
Science Foundation, grant registration number 22-
31346S.
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