Speeding Up Dominance Checks in Multi-Objective Search: New Techniques and Data Structures

In multi-objective search, given a directed graph where each edge is annotated with multiple cost metrics, a start state, and a goal state. We are interested in computing the Pareto frontier, i.e., the set of all undominated paths from the start state to the goal state. Almost all multi-objective search algorithms use dominance checks to determine if a search node can be pruned. Since dominance checks are performed in the inner loop of the multi-objective search, they are the most time-consuming part of it. In this paper, we propose (1) two novel techniques to reduce duplicate dominance checks and (2) a simple data structure that enables more efficient dominance checks. Our experimental results show that combining our proposed techniques and data structure speeds up LTMOA*, a state-of-the-art multi-objective search algorithm, by up to an order of magnitude on road network instances.