The travel market is currently undergoing a radical transformation. We've seen the growth of online travel agents whetting the appetite for bespoke holidays, with more options than you could ever explore. On the accommodation front, we can choose to stay in a hotel, a hostel, or experience life in someone's else's shoes via apps like Airbnb or CouchSurfing. Each booking implies an element of personalisation, and the explosion of'mix-and-match' services has only amplified the importance of catering for holidaymakers on a one-to-one level. A personalised, considered and tactical strategy for converting each purchase would be the natural reaction to what we're seeing, if only the market could deliver it.

Problems that require multiple agents to follow non-interfering paths from their current states to their respective goal states are called multi-agent pathfinding problems (MAPFs). In previous work, we presented Independence Detection (ID), an algorithm for breaking a large MAPF problem into smaller problems that can be solved independently. Independence Detection is complete and can be used in combination with both optimal and approximation algorithms. This paper serves as an introduction to Independence Detection and aims to clarify its details.