A Simple and Fast Bi-Objective Search Algorithm

Authors

  • Carlos Hernández Ulloa Universidad Andrés Bello
  • William Yeoh Washington University in St. Louis
  • Jorge Baier Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
  • Luis Suazo Universidad Andrés Bello
  • Han Zhang University of Southern California
  • Sven Koenig University of Southern California

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/socs.v11i1.18521

Abstract

Many interesting search problems can be formulated as bi-objective search problems; for example, transportation problems where both travel distance and time need to be minimized. Multi-objective best-first search algorithms need to maintain the set of undominated paths from the start state to each state to compute a set of paths from a given start state to a given goal state (the Pareto-optimal solutions) such that no path in the set is dominated by another path in the set. Each time they find a new path to a state n, they perform a dominance check to determine whether such a path dominates any of the previously found paths to n. Existing algorithms do not perform these checks efficiently, requiring at least a full iteration over the Open list per check. In this paper, we present the first multi-objective algorithm that performs these checks efficiently. Indeed, Bi-Objective A* (BOA*)—our algorithm—requires constant time to check for dominance. Our experimental evaluation shows that BOA*is orders-of-magnitude faster than state-of-the-art search algorithms, such as NAMOA*, Bi-Objective Dijkstra, and Bidirectional Bi-Objective Dijkstra.

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Published

2021-09-01