Multi Agent Path Planning for Medical Urban Air Mobility Services in 3D Environments

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has seen remarkable growth over the past decade, especially considering the delivery of goods. Notably, the delivery of medical supplies via Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has emerged as a promising application, which is driven by its societal benefits and has been demonstrated successfully in rural environments....

Receding Horizon Re-Ordering of Multi-Agent Execution Schedules

The trajectory planning for a fleet of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) on a roadmap is commonly referred to as the multi-agent path finding (MAPF) problem, the solution to which dictates each AGV's spatial and temporal location until it reaches its goal without collision. When executing MAPF plans in dynamic workspaces, AGVs can be...

Decentralized multi-agent path finding framework and strategies based on automated negotiation

This paper introduces a negotiation framework to solve the Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) Problem for self-interested agents in a decentralized fashion. The framework aims to achieve a good trade-off between the privacy of the agents and the effectiveness of solutions. Accordingly, a token-based bilateral negotiation protocol and two...

Multi-Agent Pickup and Delivery Problems in Uncertain Environments: Automation of hospital workplaces using autonomous transportation robots

The aging of society, population growth and chronic under-investments in education of healthcare workers have all led to a major imbalance between the demand for healthcare and the supply of healthcare. Autonomous robots can be used to relieve overqualified healthcare workers of their repetitive transportation tasks, allowing them to spend more...

Multi-agent Planning and Coordination for Automated Aircraft Ground Handling

Inspired by the vision of fully autonomous airside operations at Schiphol airport, this study aims to contribute to the short-term goal of automated aircraft ground handling. In this research, we design and evaluate a multi-agent system for planning of automated ground handling. There are two main components in the system, task allocation...

A Delay Analysis in Airport Engine-off Towing Operations Using Hierarchical Multi-Agent Path Planning

The increased pressure to reduce aircraft emissions and the growing demand for air travel causes airports to consider alternatives for fuel-inefficient aircraft taxiing. External towing tugs can be deployed to effectively reduce on-ground fuel burn of outbound aircraft. These new operations are likely to aggravate ground delays as a result of...

Multi-Agent Pickup-and-Delivery in a Distributed Baggage Handling System

Baggage handling systems in airports are generally over-designed and only need to work at full capacity for a couple of months during their lifetime. To cope with varying demand, flexible baggage handling systems are being developed which use Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) to handle a required capacity. These AGVs transport bags throughout the...

TORS: A train unit shunting and servicing simulator

When trains are finished with their transportation tasks during the day, they are moved to a shunting yard where they are routed, parked, cleaned, subject to regular maintenance checks and repaired during the night. The resulting Train Unit Shunting and Servicing problem motivates advanced research in planning and scheduling in general since...

Agent-Based Modelling and Analysis of Non-Autonomous Airport Ground Surface Operations

The highly fuel-inefficient aircraft taxi-phase causes the industry to consider alternative ground propulsion systems. External systems like the Taxibot are preferred over onboard systems as they do not require aircraft structural additions and recertifications. However, the operational implementation of external taxi-systems is expected to...

Planning and Control of Multiple Mobile Robots for Intralogistics: an optimization-based reordering strategy

In this thesis we consider multiple Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) navigating a common workspace to fulfill intralogistics tasks, typically formulated as the Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) problem. To keep plan execution deadlock-free, one approach is to construct an Action Dependency Graph (ADG) which encodes the ordering of AGVs as they...

Extending CBS to efficiently solve MAPFW

Multi-Agent Path Finding with Way-points (MAPFW) is the problem of routing agents through a graph past a set of waypoint to a goal location, without agents colliding, with the shortest combined path length. This problem has to the authors knowledge not been investigated yet even though it has implications in train scheduling problems and video...

Extending A* to solve multi-agent pathfinding problems with waypoints

In the field of cooperative multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) the optimal set of non-conflicting paths must be found for a set of agents in a graph. The addition of waypoints to this problem (MAPFW) gives rise to the possibility of more complex applications, such as in vehicle routing, aviation, computer games or robotics. Yet no algorithms have...

Agent-based distributed planning and coordination for resilient airport surface movement operations

Airport surface movement operations are complex processes with many types of adverse events which require resilient, safe, and efficient responses. One regularly occurring adverse event is that of runway reconfiguration. Agent-based distributed planning and coordination has shown promising results in controlling operations in complex systems,...

Agent-Based Distributed Planning and Coordination for Resilient Airport Surface Movement Operations

Airport surface movement operations are complex systems that experience many types of adverse events which require resilient, safe and efficient responses. One regularly occurring adverse event is that of runway reconfigurations. Agent based distributed planning and coordination has shown promising results in controlling and maintaining...