VOLT – Optimising polar science fleets with AI

What is VOLT?

VOLT – Vehicle Optimisation for Logistics and Transportation – is an AI itinerary planning tool for fleets of ships and autonomous vehicles. It decides which vessel does which task, in what order and when, across potentially hundreds of vessels and tasks. Unlike conventional scheduling tools, it takes environmental conditions such as sea ice, wind and waves into account, using routes from PolarRoute. VOLT is one of the Logist AI decision support tools developed by British Antarctic Survey (BAS) for operations planners across BAS and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

How does it work?

VOLT takes lists of science and operational tasks and the characteristics of each vehicle: speed, range, battery capacity and which tasks it can do. It weighs up a huge number of possible combinations and returns a short list of good itineraries within seconds. Planners then choose the one that works best in practice.

Because it is so fast, VOLT also works as a simulator for long-term questions, such as:

• What if we deployed more autonomous vehicles alongside the ship?
• What if these autonomous vehicles had 10% more battery?

Impact

A new way of doing science. Autonomous vehicles such as Boaty McBoatface open up new ways to do marine science, but coordinating a fleet is complex. Each vehicle must be dropped off and picked up, has limited battery range and can only do certain tasks. No human planner can work this out by hand for 100 tasks in 100 locations, so fleets like this cannot operate without tools like VOLT.

Lower emissions. Our models predict that VOLT itineraries could save up to 13% in carbon emissions using current marine infrastructure. We are developing ways to test this in real life.

Rapid replanning. Planning an itinerary by hand can take weeks or months; VOLT takes seconds. When weather changes, people need evacuating or a vessel is lost, planners can replan straight away.

Evidence-based fleet decisions. Because VOLT models vessel characteristics, it helps operators decide what vessels to run, how many, and how much battery capacity autonomous vehicles need.

1. Logist – AI decision support tools

   Logist develops decision support tools that use environmental data to help experts make the best routing and planning decisions.

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