PROST_Command_Line_Option_Notes_Thomas_Keller.txt

Notes from Thomas Keller on Prost command line parameters and time settings:
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The deliberation time is a parameter of the search engine and not a global one, so if you want to run for instance the IPC 2014 configuration with a seed of 1 and timeout of 2 seconds you'll need to run something like:

"[PROST -s 1 -se [IPC2014 -t 2]]"

The Prost command line consists of two types of parameters: those that are of a primitive data types or string (like -t, which requires a double) and others that describe an object, e.g., the planner itself ("PROST") or a search engine (like -se of the planner or -h of an THTS initializer object). The parser recognizes an object if it is surrounded by brackets ([]). Every object has its own list of options, so a line like

[PROST -se [THTS -act [UCB1] -out [UMC] -backup [PB] -init [Expand -h
[IDS]]]]

creates (at least, I didn't check any missing default parameters) 7 objects: the prost planner, a THTS search engine, a UCB1 action selection, an UMC outcome selection, a partial Bellman backup function, an initializer that expands new nodes and an IDS search engine that is used by the initializer.

If you want to change the timeouts of different components, you could use

[PROST -se [THTS -t 2.0 -act [UCB1] -out [UMC] -backup [PB] -init
[Expand -h [IDS -t 0.1]]]]

to end up with a search engine where the THTS component takes 2 seconds deliberation time and the IDS search engine opts for 0.1 seconds.

That said, I agree it is kind of confusing because the -t parameters are not doing exactly the same kind of thing.

Regarding the remaining time from the server: Prost is always ignoring that value and you only need to make sure the server doesn't terminate before Prost does. For the competitions, I always rewrote the time code to take the time from the server into account. Since all of my experiments have been conducted with a fixed deliberation time, that code never made it into the planner.