Potential Heuristics for Multi-Agent Planning

Distributed heuristic search is a well established technique for multi-agent planning. It has been shown that distributed heuristics may crucially improve the search guidance, but are costly in terms of communication and computation time. One solution is to compute a heuristic additively, in the sense that each agent can compute its part of the heuristic independently and obtain a complete heuristic estimate by summing up the individual parts. In this paper, we show that the recently published potential heuristic is a good candidate for such heuristic, moreover admissible. We also demonstrate how the multi-agent distributed A* search can be modified in order to benefit from such additive heuristic. The modified search equipped with a distributed potential heuristic outperforms the state of the art.