PolarRoute

PolarRoute is a long-distance maritime polar route planning package, able to take into account complex and changing environmental conditions. It allows the construction of optimised routes through three main stages: discrete modelling of the environmental conditions using a non-uniform mesh, the construction of mesh-optimal paths, and physics informed path smoothing. In order to account for different vehicle properties we construct a series of data-driven functions that can be applied to the environmental mesh to determine the speed limitations and fuel requirements for a given vessel and mesh cell. The environmental modelling component of this functionality is provided by the MeshiPhi library.

Installation

PolarRoute is available from PyPI and can be installed by running:

pip install polar-route

Alternatively you can install PolarRoute by downloading the source code from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/Antarctica/PolarRoute
pip install -e ./PolarRoute

Use of -e is optional, based on whether you want to be able to edit the installed copy of the package.

NOTE: Some features of the PolarRoute package require GDAL to be installed. Please consult the documentation for further guidance.

Required Data sources

PolarRoute has been built to work with a variety of open-source atmospheric and oceanographic data sources. For testing and demonstration purposes it is also possible to generate artificial Gaussian Random Field data.

A full list of supported data sources and their associated dataloaders is given in the 'Dataloader Overview' section of the MeshiPhi manual

Documentation

The documentation for the package is available to read at: https://antarctica.github.io/PolarRoute/

If you make changes to the source of the documentation you will need to rebuild the corresponding html files using Sphinx. The dependencies for this can be installed through pip:

pip install sphinx sphinx_markdown_builder sphinx_rtd_theme rinohtype

When updating the docs, run the following command within the PolarRoute directory to recompile.

sphinx-build -b html ./docs/source ./docs/html

Sometimes the cache needs to be cleared for internal links to update. If facing this problem, run this from the PolarRoute directory.

rm -r docs/html/.doctrees/

Developers

Autonomous Marine Operations Planning (AMOP) Team, AI Lab, British Antarctic Survey

Collaboration

We are currently assessing the best practice for collaboration on the codebase, until then please contact amop@bas.ac.uk for further info.

License

This software is licensed under a MIT license, but request users cite our publication.

Jonathan D. Smith, Samuel Hall, George Coombs, James Byrne, Michael A. S. Thorne, J. Alexander Brearley, Derek Long, Michael Meredith, Maria Fox, (2022), Autonomous Passage Planning for a Polar Vessel, arXiv, https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.02389

For more information please see the attached LICENSE file.