Multi-Agent Target Assignment and Path Finding for Intelligent Warehouse: A Cooperative Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Perspective

TL;DR

This is the first work to model the TAPF problem for intelligent warehouse to cooperative multi-agent deep RL, and the first to simultaneously address TAPF based on multi-agent deep RL, and the first to simultaneously address TAPF based on multi-agent deep RL with physical dynamics of agents considered.

Abstract

Multi-agent target assignment and path planning (TAPF) are two key problems in intelligent warehouse. However, most literature only addresses one of these two problems separately. In this study, we propose a method to simultaneously solve target assignment and path planning from a perspective of cooperative multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (RL). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to model the TAPF problem for intelligent warehouse to cooperative multi-agent deep RL, and the first to simultaneously address TAPF based on multi-agent deep RL. Furthermore, previous literature rarely considers the physical dynamics of agents. In this study, the physical dynamics of the agents is considered. Experimental results show that our method performs well in various task settings, which means that the target assignment is solved reasonably well and the planned path is almost shortest. Moreover, our method is more time-efficient than baselines.

Figures (11)

• Figure 1: Modeling TAPF as a MARL problem
• Figure 2: The physical dynamics of agents
• Figure 3: Action space of an agent
• Figure 4: Distansce matrix of tasks and agents: $\Vert \boldsymbol{P_{tasks} - P_{agents}} \Vert$. The element $dis(a \ i, t \ i)$ represents the distance between $agent \ i$ and $task \ i$.
• Figure 5: Average return