Massive Maritime Path Planning: A Contextual Online Learning Approach

The ocean has been investigated for centuries across the world, and planning the travel path for vessels in the ocean has become a hot topic in recent decades as the increasing development of worldwide business trading. Planning such suitable paths is often based on big data processing in cybernetics, while not many investigations have been done. We attempt to find the optimal path for vessels in the ocean by proposing an online learning dispatch approach on studying the mission–executing–feedback (MEF) model. The proposed approach explores the ocean subdomain (OS) to achieve the largest average traveling feedback for different vessels. It balances the ocean path by a deep and wide search, and considers adaptation for these vessels. Further, we propose a contextual multiarmed bandit-based algorithm, which provides accurate exploration results with sublinear regret and significantly improves the learning speed. The experimental results show that the proposed MEF approach possesses 90% accuracy gain over random exploration and achieves about 25% accuracy improvement over other contextual bandit models on supporting big data online learning pre-eminently.