Cooperative Pathfinding

Cooperative Pathfinding is a multi-agent path planning problem where agents must find non-colliding routes to separate destinations, given full information about the routes of other agents. This paper presents three new algorithms for efficiently solving this problem, suitable for use in Real-Time Strategy games and other real-time environments. The algorithms are decoupled approaches that break down the problem into a series of single-agent searches. Cooperative A* (CA*) searches space-time for a non-colliding route. Hierarchical Cooperative A* (HCA*) uses an abstract heuristic to boost performance. Finally, Windowed Hierarchical Cooperative A* (WHCA*) limits the space-time search depth to a dynamic window,…