# General Introduction¶

Since 2010, I have been working on the development of an open source toolkit for supporting decision-making under deep uncertainty. This toolkit is known as the exploratory modeling workbench. The motivation for this name is that in my opinion all model-based deep uncertainty approaches are forms of exploratory modeling as first introduced by Bankes (1993). The design of the workbench has undergone various changes over time, but it has started to stabilize in the fall of 2016. In the summer 0f 2017, I published a paper detailing the workbench (Kwakkel, 2017). There is an in depth example in the paper, but for the documentation I want to provide a more tutorial style description of the functionality of the workbench.

As a starting point, I will use the Direct Policy Search example that is available for Rhodium (Quinn et al 2017). A quick note on terminology is in order here. I have a background in transport modeling. Here we often use discrete event simulation models. These are intrinsically stochastic models. It is standard practice to run these models several times and take descriptive statistics over the set of runs. In discrete event simulation, and also in the context of agent based modeling, this is known as running replications. The workbench adopts this terminology and draws a sharp distinction between designing experiments over a set of deeply uncertain factors, and performing replications of this experiment to cope with stochastic uncertainty.

[1]:

import math

# more or less default imports when using
# the workbench
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

from scipy.optimize import brentq

def get_antropogenic_release(xt, c1, c2, r1, r2, w1):
'''

Parameters
----------
xt : float
polution in lake at time t
c1 : float
center rbf 1
c2 : float
center rbf 2
r1 : float
ratius rbf 1
r2 : float
ratius rbf 2
w1 : float
weight of rbf 1

Returns
-------
float

note:: w2 = 1 - w1

'''

rule = w1*(abs(xt-c1)/r1)**3+(1-w1)*(abs(xt-c2)/r2)**3
at1 = max(rule, 0.01)
at = min(at1, 0.1)

return at

def lake_model(b=0.42, q=2.0, mean=0.02,
stdev=0.001, delta=0.98, alpha=0.4,
nsamples=100, myears=100, c1=0.25,
c2=0.25, r1=0.5, r2=0.5,
w1=0.5, seed=None):
'''runs the lake model for nsamples stochastic realisation using
specified random seed.

Parameters
----------
b : float
decay rate for P in lake (0.42 = irreversible)
q : float
recycling exponent
mean : float
mean of natural inflows
stdev : float
standard deviation of natural inflows
delta : float
future utility discount rate
alpha : float
utility from pollution
nsamples : int, optional
myears : int, optional
c1 : float
c2 : float
r1 : float
r2 : float
w1 : float
seed : int, optional
seed for the random number generator

Returns
-------
tuple

'''
np.random.seed(seed)
Pcrit = brentq(lambda x: x**q/(1+x**q) - b*x, 0.01, 1.5)

X = np.zeros((myears,))
average_daily_P = np.zeros((myears,))
reliability = 0.0
inertia = 0
utility = 0

for _ in range(nsamples):
X[0] = 0.0
decision = 0.1

decisions = np.zeros(myears,)
decisions[0] = decision

natural_inflows = np.random.lognormal(
math.log(mean**2 / math.sqrt(stdev**2 + mean**2)),
math.sqrt(math.log(1.0 + stdev**2 / mean**2)),
size=myears)

for t in range(1, myears):

# here we use the decision rule
decision = get_antropogenic_release(X[t-1], c1, c2, r1, r2, w1)
decisions[t] = decision

X[t] = (1-b)*X[t-1] + X[t-1]**q/(1+X[t-1]**q) + decision +\
natural_inflows[t-1]
average_daily_P[t] += X[t]/nsamples

reliability += np.sum(X < Pcrit)/(nsamples*myears)
inertia += np.sum(np.absolute(np.diff(decisions)
< 0.02)) / (nsamples*myears)
utility += np.sum(alpha*decisions*np.power(delta,
np.arange(myears))) / nsamples
max_P = np.max(average_daily_P)
return max_P, utility, inertia, reliability


## Connecting a python function to the workbench¶

Now we are ready to connect this model to the workbench. We have to specify the uncertainties, the outcomes, and the policy levers. For the uncertainties and the levers, we can use real valued parameters, integer valued parameters, and categorical parameters. For outcomes, we can use either scalar, single valued outcomes or time series outcomes. For convenience, we can also explicitly control constants in case we want to have them set to a value different from their default value.

[2]:

from ema_workbench import (RealParameter, ScalarOutcome, Constant,
Model)

model = Model('lakeproblem', function=lake_model)

#specify uncertainties
model.uncertainties = [RealParameter('b', 0.1, 0.45),
RealParameter('q', 2.0, 4.5),
RealParameter('mean', 0.01, 0.05),
RealParameter('stdev', 0.001, 0.005),
RealParameter('delta', 0.93, 0.99)]

# set levers
model.levers = [RealParameter("c1", -2, 2),
RealParameter("c2", -2, 2),
RealParameter("r1", 0, 2),
RealParameter("r2", 0, 2),
RealParameter("w1", 0, 1)]

#specify outcomes
model.outcomes = [ScalarOutcome('max_P'),
ScalarOutcome('utility'),
ScalarOutcome('inertia'),
ScalarOutcome('reliability')]

# override some of the defaults of the model
model.constants = [Constant('alpha', 0.41),
Constant('nsamples', 150),
Constant('myears', 100)]


## Performing experiments¶

Now that we have specified the model with the workbench, we are ready to perform experiments on it. We can use evaluators to distribute these experiments either over multiple cores on a single machine, or over a cluster using ipyparallel. Using any parallelization is an advanced topic, in particular if you are on a windows machine. The code as presented here will run fine in parallel on a mac or Linux machine. If you are trying to run this in parallel using multiprocessing on a windows machine, from within a jupyter notebook, it won’t work. The solution is to move the lake_model and get_antropogenic_release to a separate python module and import the lake model function into the notebook.

Another common practice when working with the exploratory modeling workbench is to turn on the logging functionality that it provides. This will report on the progress of the experiments, as well as provide more insight into what is happening in particular in case of errors.

If we want to perform experiments on the model we have just defined, we can use the perform_experiments method on the evaluator, or the stand alone perform_experiments function. We can perform experiments over the uncertainties and/or over the levers. Any given parameterization of the levers is known as a policy, while any given parametrization over the uncertainties is known as a scenario. Any policy is evaluated over each of the scenarios. So if we want to use 100 scenarios and 10 policies, this means that we will end up performing 100 * 10 = 1000 experiments. By default, the workbench uses Latin hypercube sampling for both sampling over levers and sampling over uncertainties. However, the workbench also offers support for full factorial, partial factorial, and Monte Carlo sampling, as well as wrappers for the various sampling schemes provided by SALib.

The ema_workbench offers support for parallelization of the execution of the experiments using either the multiprocessing or ipyparallel. There are various OS specific concerns you have to keep in mind when using either of these libraries. Please have a look at the documentation of these libraries, before using them.

[3]:

from ema_workbench import (MultiprocessingEvaluator, ema_logging,
perform_experiments)
ema_logging.log_to_stderr(ema_logging.INFO)

with MultiprocessingEvaluator(model) as evaluator:
results = evaluator.perform_experiments(scenarios=1000, policies=10)

[MainProcess/INFO] pool started
[MainProcess/INFO] performing 1000 scenarios * 10 policies * 1 model(s) = 10000 experiments
[MainProcess/INFO] 1000 cases completed
[MainProcess/INFO] 2000 cases completed
[MainProcess/INFO] 3000 cases completed
[MainProcess/INFO] 4000 cases completed
[MainProcess/INFO] 5000 cases completed
[MainProcess/INFO] 6000 cases completed
[MainProcess/INFO] 7000 cases completed
[MainProcess/INFO] 8000 cases completed
[MainProcess/INFO] 9000 cases completed
[MainProcess/INFO] 10000 cases completed
[MainProcess/INFO] experiments finished
[MainProcess/INFO] terminating pool


## Processing the results of the experiments¶

By default, the return of perform_experiments is a tuple of length 2. The first item in the tuple is the experiments. The second item is the outcomes. Experiments and outcomes are aligned by index. The experiments are stored in a numpy structured array, while the outcomes are a dict with the name of the outcome as key, and the values are in a numpy array.

[4]:

experiments, outcomes = results
print(experiments.shape)
print(list(outcomes.keys()))

(10000, 13)
['max_P', 'utility', 'inertia', 'reliability']


We can easily visualize these results. The workbench comes with various convenience plotting functions built on top of matplotlib and seaborn. We can however also easily use seaborn or matplotlib directly. For example, we can create a pairplot using seaborn where we group our outcomes by policy. For this, we need to create a dataframe with the outcomes and a policy column. By default the name of a policy is a string representation of the dict with lever names and values. We can replace this easily with a number as shown below.

[7]:

policies = experiments['policy']
for i, policy in enumerate(np.unique(policies)):
experiments.loc[policies==policy, 'policy'] = str(i)

data = pd.DataFrame(outcomes)
data['policy'] = policies


Next, all that is left is to use seaborn’s pairplot function to visualize the data.

[8]:

sns.pairplot(data, hue='policy', vars=list(outcomes.keys()))
plt.show()

/Users/jhkwakkel/miniconda3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/scipy/stats/stats.py:1713: FutureWarning: Using a non-tuple sequence for multidimensional indexing is deprecated; use arr[tuple(seq)] instead of arr[seq]. In the future this will be interpreted as an array index, arr[np.array(seq)], which will result either in an error or a different result.
return np.add.reduce(sorted[indexer] * weights, axis=axis) / sumval
/Users/jhkwakkel/miniconda3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/statsmodels/nonparametric/kde.py:488: RuntimeWarning: invalid value encountered in true_divide
binned = fast_linbin(X, a, b, gridsize) / (delta * nobs)
/Users/jhkwakkel/miniconda3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/statsmodels/nonparametric/kdetools.py:34: RuntimeWarning: invalid value encountered in double_scalars
FAC1 = 2*(np.pi*bw/RANGE)**2
/Users/jhkwakkel/miniconda3/lib/python3.6/site-packages/numpy/core/fromnumeric.py:83: RuntimeWarning: invalid value encountered in reduce
return ufunc.reduce(obj, axis, dtype, out, **passkwargs)

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