Extended Conflict-Based Search for the Convoy Movement Problem

The Convoy Movement Problem (CMP) is a common military scenario that requires a clash-free plan for moving large convoys from one location to another with constraints on time and space. This article proposes a distributed agent-based approach for CMP that meets most on-field deployment constraints. The solution is based on a multi-agent path-finding algorithm called conflict-based search (CBS) for point objects. Convoys can't be regarded as point objects: their length can be significantly longer than the edges on which they travel. Hence, a modification to the CBS algorithm makes it applicable to spatially extended objects. This eXtended CBS (XCBS) algorithm has been used to solve the CMP while meeting most of its constraints. The algorithm has been tested on road networks with as many as 40,000 vertices and 79,600 edges for 800 convoys.