PC2P: Multi-Agent Path Finding via Personalized-Enhanced Communication and Crowd Perception

Abstract

Distributed Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) integrated with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has emerged as a prominent research focus, enabling real-time cooperative decision-making in partially observable environments through inter-agent communication. However, due to insufficient collaborative and perceptual capabilities, existing methods are inadequate for scaling across diverse environmental conditions. To address these challenges, we propose PC<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup>P, a novel distributed MAPF method derived from a Q-learning-based MARL framework. Initially, we introduce a personalized-enhanced communication mechanism based on dynamic graph topology, which ascertains the core aspects of "who" and "what" in interactive process through three-stage operations: selection, generation, and aggregation. Concurrently, we incorporate local crowd perception to enrich agents’ heuristic observation, thereby strengthening the model’s guidance for effective actions via the integration of static spatial constraints and dynamic occupancy changes. To resolve extreme deadlock issues, we propose a region-based deadlock-breaking strategy that leverages expert guidance to implement efficient coordination within confined areas. Experimental results demonstrate that PC<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup>P achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art distributed MAPF methods in varied environments. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of each module for overall performance.