Welcome to IBOAT MCTS’s documentation!

Context

In this project we develop a reinforcement learning algorithm based on parallel Monte-Carlo tree search to tackle the problem of long-term path planning under uncertainty for offshore sailing. This domain of application is challenging as it combines unreliable and time varying wind conditions with complex and uncertain boat performances. Contrarily to state of the art approaches applied to the sailing problem, we build a generator that models state transitions considering these two types of uncertainty. The first one is on the boat dynamics : given a environment state the boat performances are not deterministic. And the second one is uncertain weather forecasts. In practice, the wind is estimated from multiple weather forecasts (each one of them being a weather scenario with a given probability of happening). The boat’s dynamics are evaluated with a noisy Velocity Prediction Program (VPP). Then, a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm is applied in parallel to all the weather scenarios to find the sequence of headings that minimizes the travel time between two points.

Here you will find the documentation of the parallel MCTS and the isochrones routing methods. But also all the tools to download and visualize weather forecasts.

Requirements

The project depends on the following extensions :

  1. NumPy for the data structures (http://www.numpy.org)
  2. SciPy for interpolation (https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy-0.16.1/reference/index.html)
  3. Matplotlib for the visualisation (https://matplotlib.org)
  4. Basemap for map projections (http://matplotlib.org/basemap)
  5. NetCF4 to read and write in netCDF file (https://unidata.github.io/netcdf4-python/)

Indices and tables