Optimized multi-agent routing in shared guidepath networks

This paper overviews a research program of ours that concerns the routing of a number of traveling agents over a transportation medium that is abstracted as a “zone”-controlled guidepath network. From an application standpoint, this class of problems arise in the real-time management of the traffic that takes place in many contemporary material handling systems. But quite interestingly, the same problems also arise in the routing of the ionized atoms that are the elementary information carriers in the context of quantum computing. The paper provides a conceptual description and some motivational applications for the aforementioned problems, places these problems in the context of the existing literature, and outlines the methodological base and the key results that have been developed in the presented research; detailed expositions of these technical developments can be found in the provided references.