Swarms of Mobile Agents: From Discrete to Continuous Movements in Multi-Agent Path Finding

A variant of multi-agent path finding in continuous space and time with geometric agents MAPF is addressed in this paper. The task is to navigate agents that move smoothly between predefined positions to their individual goals so that they do not collide. We introduce a novel solving approach for obtaining makespan optimal solutions called SMT-CBS based on satisfiability modulo theories (SMT). The new algorithm combines collision resolution known from conflict-based search (CBS) with previous generation of incomplete SAT encodings on top of a novel scheme for selecting decision variables in a potentially uncountable search space. We experimentally compare SMTCBS and the previous CCBS algorithm for MAPF
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