Optimal planning with rare catastrophic events
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Although rare catastrophic events, such as mid-air collisions between aircraft, occur infrequently, their impact is significant. Understanding and mitigating the risk of such events require estimating the likelihood of the events and planning proper actions for avoiding them. Estimation and planning problems are often approached using sampling-based methods. These methods use models for simulation and take into account events of interest. If the problems involve rare catastrophic events, these methods converge slowly and produce high variance estimates. Moreover, in planning, the rare occurrence of the events obstructs the sampling-based method from exploring and exploiting the best action. This thesis presents methods for addressing these challenges, by efficiently estimating the likelihood of the rare catastrophic events and making decisions under uncertainty to minimize the risk of the events while achieving mission objectives. The methods are presented with three real-world applications. First, the thesis explores the use of rare event simulation techniques in aircraft collision risk estimation. The cross-entropy method with weight limits and variable selection is applied for variance reduction. Second, the multilevel splitting method, which is a variance reduction technique, is incorporated into decision-theoretic single-shot decision problems. The resulting method is applied to wildfire surveillance using an unmanned aircraft. Lastly, the thesis proposes new approaches for exploration in sequential decision problems and applies a variance reduction technique. It presents a rerouting problem involving unmanned aircraft in GPS-denied environments. Empirical studies demonstrate significant improvements in performance when using the proposed methods.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Kim, Youngjun | |
|---|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. | |
| Primary advisor | Kochenderfer, Mykel J, 1980- | |
| Thesis advisor | Kochenderfer, Mykel J, 1980- | |
| Thesis advisor | Alonso, Juan José, 1968- | |
| Thesis advisor | Pavone, Marco, 1980- | |
| Advisor | Alonso, Juan José, 1968- | |
| Advisor | Pavone, Marco, 1980- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Youngjun Kim. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Young Joon Kim
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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