Yihao Liu

刘逸灏

Ph.D Student
Full Stack Developer
June 15, 1997
Singapore
liuyh970615@gmail.com

About Me

I'm currently a Ph.D student in Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. I'm an graduate researcher in SCALE lab, supervised by Prof. Tang Xueyan, currently working on Algorithms in Multi-Agent Systems.

Despite my current research topic, my research interest spread widely in operating systems, distributed systems, network security and algorithms. "Practice is the sole criterion of truth", I would like to build effective systems and platforms for researchers, developers and the community. I'm ready to contribute to any small improvement of the infrastructure.

Besides a researcher, I started my life as a programmer and developer quite early. I learned C/C++ and attended NOIP (National Olympiad in Informatics in Provinces) in China and it becomes my most confident language. I developed my interest in other fields in computer science when I tried to find out what exactly happened behind these code I wrote. I was deeply attracted by the open source community and became an active developer in many projects as well.

Learning is the passion of my life, learning new knowledge in different fields, learning new programming languages, frameworks and features, and even learning how to play games all inspire me. My passion in learning can be witnessed by my proficiency in various OSs and programming languages. I'm always curious about the latest language features of C++ and Python; I helped the development of many Java projects, from Swagger API to Minecraft Mods; I developed and maintained web services across many types of Linux distributions during my undergraduate study; I can process data science (my undergraduate minor) tasks in scientific Python, MATLAB, Julia, and Mathematica; I'm also broadening my language family by learning some new ones such as Go and Rust.

As a fullstack developer skilled in Python, Javascript (React), SQL, CSS and many others, I built the theme of this website with Gatsby. The theme is named "gatsby-theme-academic", which is specially designed for academic usage by researchers and students. It is still under development and will be open-sourced soon, please check this post for details.

Education

Jan 2020 - Present
Ph.D in Computer Science
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Sept 2017 - Aug 2021
(Second) B.S. in Applied Mathematics
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
Sept 2015 - Aug 2019
B.S.E. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (with Minor in Data Science)
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
Sept 2008 - June 2015
Middle School
Shanghai Southwest Weiyu Middle School, China

Interests

Distributed Systems
Containerization
Full Stack Development
Open Source Community

Awards & Scholarships

NTU Research Scholarship
Nov 2019
Meritorious Winner in Mathematical Contest In Modeling
Feb 2019

Selected Research

Continuous-Time Multi-Agent Path Planning with LNS
June 2024 - Present
#scheduling
#algorithm

Discrete-time multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) problems have been extensively studied, with conflict-based search (CBS) being a well-known optimal algorithm for solving classical MAPF instances, and Large Neighborhood Search being a fast alternative method to obtain a sub-optimal solution. In a continuous-time MAPF problem, conflicts can occur between agents traversing different edges, as well as between an agent waiting at a node and another agent moving along an edge. We considered all types of ...

Multi-Agent Path Execution with Uncertainty
Jan 2022 - Dec 2022
#scheduling
#algorithm

In real-world multi-agent applications, unexpected conditions can break the assumptions made in path planning and degrade the effectiveness of path execution. This paper studies robust and effective execution of multi-agent path plans under uncertainty. To guarantee conflict-freeness and deadlock-freeness, we define a feasibility problem to check whether the remaining portion of a path plan can be successfully executed. We prove that the problem is NP-complete and propose a feasibility test algo ...

Multi-Agent Pickup and Delivery with Individual Deadlines
Xiaohu Wu, 
Yihao Liu, 
Xueyan Tang, 
Wentong Cai, 
Funing Bai, 
Gilbert Khonstantine, 
Guopeng Zhao
Jan 2020 - Dec 2021
WI-IAT 2021 (Full Paper) / SOCS 2021 (Extended Abstract)
#scheduling
#algorithm

We study the multi-agent pickup and delivery problem with task deadlines, where a team of agents execute a batch of tasks with individual deadlines to maximize the number of tasks completed by their deadlines. Existing approaches to multi-agent pickup and delivery typically address task assignment and path planning separately. We take an integrated approach that assigns and plans one task at a time taking into account the agent states resulting from all the previous task assignments and path pla ...

pdf
extended abstract
code
Playground: A Safe Building Operating
Oct 2020 - Present
#os
#building

Building operating systems are an emerging class of system software that provides services to applications running on commercial buildings. The current state-of-the-art requires applications to be trusted and carefully monitored due to a lack of authorization, access control, and execution isolation mechanisms in existing building operating systems. Proposed solutions do not adequately handle the complexity and scale of modern buildings, therefore impeding the adoption of applications that can e ...

GitHub
code
Robust Continuous-Time Multi-Agent Path Execution
Jan 2023 - Present
#scheduling
#algorithm

Most prior work on multi-agent path finding and execution has assumed that time is discretized into timesteps and the agents move in grid maps with uniform action durations. However, in real-world multi-agent applications, agents of different shapes can move in arbitrary directions, and unforeseen failures and anomalies can cause unexpected delays of the agents. These delays are difficult to model and predict, and they can break the assumptions made in path planning and degrade the effectiveness ...

Last Updated on Mar 20th 2025