TY - JOUR
T1 - Optimally Solving the Multiple Watchman Route Problem with Heuristic Search
AU - Livne, Yaakov
AU - Atzmon, Dor
AU - Skyler, Shawn
AU - Boyarski, Eli
AU - Shapiro, Amir
AU - Felner, Ariel
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was sponsored by the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF) under grant numbers 2017692 and 2021643, and by Israel Science Foundation (ISF) under grant number 844/17.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved.
PY - 2023/1/1
Y1 - 2023/1/1
N2 - In the Watchman Route Problem (WRP), the task is to find a path for a watchman agent such that all locations in the given map will be visually seen by the watchman at least once during the path traversal. Recently, the problem has been optimally solved on a grid map using heuristic search. In this paper, we extend this work to the case of multiple agents. We call this problem the Multiple Watchman Route Problem (MWRP). In MWRP, the task is to find a path for each watchman such that each location on the map will be seen by at least one watchman. We optimally solve MWRP with heuristic search for two different objective functions with a number of A*-based variants, including an enhanced branching mechanism. We then provide an experimental study on these methods and on other attributes of this problem.
AB - In the Watchman Route Problem (WRP), the task is to find a path for a watchman agent such that all locations in the given map will be visually seen by the watchman at least once during the path traversal. Recently, the problem has been optimally solved on a grid map using heuristic search. In this paper, we extend this work to the case of multiple agents. We call this problem the Multiple Watchman Route Problem (MWRP). In MWRP, the task is to find a path for each watchman such that each location on the map will be seen by at least one watchman. We optimally solve MWRP with heuristic search for two different objective functions with a number of A*-based variants, including an enhanced branching mechanism. We then provide an experimental study on these methods and on other attributes of this problem.
KW - Heuristic Search
KW - Multi-Agent
KW - Watchman Route Problem
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85171272552&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference article
AN - SCOPUS:85171272552
SN - 1548-8403
VL - 2023-May
SP - 905
EP - 913
JO - Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS
JF - Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS
T2 - 22nd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2023
Y2 - 29 May 2023 through 2 June 2023
ER -