PolarRoute

PolarRoute is a long-distance maritime polar route planning package, taking into account complex changing environmental conditions. The codebase 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, representing these quantities graphically and geospatially.

Installation

The PolarRoute package requires GDAL files to be installed. This software can be installed on Windows by running the required wheels for GDAL and FIONA. More information can be found in the manual pages linked above. Once these requirements are met then the software can be installed by:

Github:

git clone https://github.com/Antarctica/PolarRoute
python setup.py install

Pip:

pip install polar-route

NOTE: The installation process may vary slightly dependent on OS. Please consult the documentation for further installation guidance.

Required Data sources

Polar-route has been built to work with a variety of open-source atmospheric and oceanographic data sources. A list of supported data sources and their associated data-loaders is given in the 'Data Loaders' section of the manual

Documentation

Sphinx is used to generate documentation for this project. The dependencies 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/build/.doctrees/

Developers

Jonathan Smith, Samuel Hall, George Coombs, James Byrne, Michael Thorne, Maria Fox, Harrison Abbot, Ayat Fekry

Collaboration

We are currently assessing the best practice for collaboration on the codebase, until then please contact polarroute@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.