Ron Zvi Stern

In the Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) problem, the aim is to find collision free paths for multiple agents. MAPF has many practical applications and has spawned massive research interest in the past two decades. Most MAPF research assumed that every agent is assigned a target it must reach. This assumption often does not hold in several key applications such as automated warehouses and parking lots, where some agents are assigned targets to reach, and others, denoted as unassigned agents, can either stay idle or move to clear the way for the assigned agents. In this paper we introduce this important problem, explain its uniqueness and encourage the entire community to work on it.