On the transfer time complexity of cooperative vehicle routing

Motivated by next-generation air transportation systems, this paper investigates the relationship between traffic volume and congestion in a multi-agent system, assuming that the agents can communicate their intentions with one another. In particular, we consider n independent mobile agents, each assigned an origin and a destination point, and study how the minimum time necessary to safely transfer all agents from their origin to their destination scales with the number of agents n. We provide an algorithm for which the transfer time scales logarithmically in n. This is an improvement over previous results that rely on more conservative conflict models because the agents do not leverage inter-agent cooperation to the same degree, resulting in transfer times that scale as √n.