High Density Automated Valet Parking via Multi-agent Path Finding

Abstract

Improving the land use of parking lots is an essential component of good urban planning. To this end, many planners have introduced cooperative automated valet parking (Co-AVP) systems that realize high-density parking (HDP). Effective HDP requires the relocation of vehicles that blocks other vehicles from entering and leaving the Co-AVP. This paper proposes and solves a destination-assignment and path-planning problem for multiple vehicles with three roles: entering, leaving, and relocating. We minimize the total travel time of leaving vehicles and the total travel distance of entering and relocating vehicles from a service-policy viewpoint. We then propose two methods, integer linear programming (ILP)-based and conflictbased search (CBS)-based, for solving the problem. Numerical experiments demonstrated that the ILP-based approach scales better than the CBS-based approach. We also confirmed the applicability of our approaches to realistic parking situations.