HiMAP-Travel: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Planning for Long-Horizon Constrained Travel
The Viet Bui ⋅ Wenjun Li ⋅ Yong Liu
Abstract
Sequential LLM agents fail on long-horizon planning with hard constraints like budgets and diversity requirements. As planning progresses and context grows, these agents drift from global constraints. We propose **HiMAP-Travel**, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that splits planning into strategic coordination and parallel day-level execution. A Coordinator allocates resources across days, while Day Executors plan independently in parallel. Three key mechanisms enable this: a transactional monitor enforcing budget and uniqueness constraints across parallel agents, a bargaining protocol allowing agents to reject infeasible sub-goals and trigger re-planning, and a single policy trained with GRPO that powers all agents through role conditioning. On TravelPlanner, HiMAP-Travel with Qwen3-8B achieves 52.78% validation and 52.65% test Final Pass Rate (FPR). In a controlled comparison with identical model, training, and tools, it outperforms the sequential DeepTravel baseline by +8.67 pp. It also surpasses ATLAS by +17.65 pp and MTP by +10.0 pp. On FlexTravelBench multi-turn scenarios, it achieves 44.34% (2-turn) and 37.42% (3-turn) FPR while reducing latency 2.5$\times$ through parallelization.
Lay Summary
We introduce HiMAP-Travel, an AI system that tackles this by splitting the job between a manager agent and a team of day-level worker agents running in parallel. The manager distributes the budget and assigns each day's cities; the workers plan their days independently but share a common rulebook that prevents conflicts like overspending or duplicate bookings. If a day's assignment turns out to be impossible, the worker flags it and the manager revises the plan. On standard travel-planning benchmarks, HiMAP-Travel outperforms existing AI planners while completing plans 2.5 times faster.
Successful Page Load