LG: Local Guidance for Configuration-Based Multi-Agent Pathfinding

LG is an extension to LaCAM, introducing local guidance — a mechanism that supplies each agent with spatiotemporal hints during multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF). While global guidance provides coarse, static information about congestion mitigation, local guidance dynamically constructs agent-wise short-horizon plans to better handle local bottlenecks and congestion in real-time. The paper will appear at AAAI-26.

LG integrates into the configuration-based MAPF solver LaCAM, maintaining its scalability and completeness while significantly improving solution quality. Empirical results demonstrate that LG reduces flowtime by up to 38% over baseline LaCAM and outperforms state-of-the-art anytime solvers such as LaCAM3 and LNS2, all while preserving real-time responsiveness for up to 1,000 agents.

LaCAM — The baseline configuration-based MAPF solver.

LG-LaCAM — LaCAM augmented with local guidance.

Visualization of 400 agents navigating a multi-room environment.
LG-LaCAM visibly alleviates local congestion and accelerates overall flowtime compared to standard LaCAM.

Citation

If you find this work to be useful in your research, please consider citing:

@article{arita2025local,
  title={Local Guidance for Configuration-Based Multi-Agent Pathfinding},
  author={Arita, Tomoki and Okumura, Keisuke},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.19072},
  year={2025}
}

Building

All you need is CMake (≥v3.16). The code is written in C++(17).

First, clone this repo with submodules.

git clone --recursive {this repo}

Then, build the project.

cmake -B build && make -C build -j4

Usage

build/main -i assets/random-32-32-10-random-1.scen -m assets/random-32-32-10.map -N 400 -v 3 --lg --lg_window 20

The result will be saved in build/result.txt.

You can find details of all parameters with:

build/main --help

Visualizer

This repository is compatible with allegorywrite@mapf-visualizer. For example,

mapf-visualizer assets/random-32-32-10.map build/result.txt

Notes

install pre-commit for formatting

pre-commit install

simple test

ctest --test-dir ./build