# Evaluation Metrics¶

The NeurIPS 2020 challenge is the newest competition around the Flatland environment.

In this edition, we are encouraging participants to develop innovative solutions that leverage reinforcement learning. The evaluation metrics and prize distribution are designed accordingly.

## ⚖ Evaluation metrics¶

In this edition, the primary metrics is the mean normalized return from your agents - the higher the better.

What is the mean normalized return?

• The return is the sum of rewards your agents accumulate during each episode.

• These returns are then averaged across all the evaluation episodes that take place for each submission.

• To normalize this mean return, we scale it so that it stays in the range $$[-1.0, 0.0]$$. This makes it possible to compare results between environments of different dimensions.

In code:

normalized_reward = cumulative_reward / (self.env._max_episode_steps * self.env.get_num_agents())

• In Round 2, we add +1.0 to the normalized reward to make it positive. It is then in the range [0.0, 1.0].

The episodes finish when all the trains have reached their target, or when the maximum number of time steps is reached. Therefore:

• The minimum possible value (ie worst possible) is -1.0, which occurs if none of the agents reach their goal during the episode.

• The maximum possible value (ie best possible) is 0.0, which would occur if all the agents would reach their targets in one time step, which is generally not achievable.

You can read more about the reward structure in the environment documentation.

## ⏱ Time limits¶

The agents have to act within strict time limits:

• You are allowed up to 5 minutes of initial planning time before any agent moves.

• Beyond that point, the agents have 5 seconds per time step to indicate their next actions, no matter the number of agents.

• The full evaluation must finish in 8 hours.

If the agents fail to act in time during either the initial planning or during any time step, the current episode will receive a score of -1.0. The evaluation will then continue from the following episode. Your submission should catch the StopAsyncIteration exception when performing a step (env_step()) in case a timeout error occurs. If a timeout occurs, you should reset the environment (env_create()) before continuing further.

If a submission doesn’t complete in 8 hours, it will be considered as failed and won’t receive a score.

A good way to test if your submission is fast enough is to submit it in debug mode. It will then have 28 episodes to complete with an overall time limit of 48 minutes. If your submission is fast enough to finish in time in debug mode, it is likely that it will also finish in time when evaluated on the full test set.

The agents are evaluated in a container with access to 4 CPU cores (4 hyper-threads of an Intel Xeon E5 v3 at 2.3 GHz base, 3.8 GHz single core max turbo) and 15 GB of main memory. It is also possible to get access to a GPU, contact the organizers if your approach could take advantage of one.