Explainable Time Series Prediction of Tyre Energy in Formula One Race Strategy

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Todd, Jamie, Jiang, Junqi, Russo, Aaron, Winkler, Steffen, Sale, Stuart, McMillan, Joseph, Rago, Antonio
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Todd, Jamie
Jiang, Junqi
Russo, Aaron
Winkler, Steffen
Sale, Stuart
McMillan, Joseph
Rago, Antonio
author_facet Todd, Jamie
Jiang, Junqi
Russo, Aaron
Winkler, Steffen
Sale, Stuart
McMillan, Joseph
Rago, Antonio
contents Formula One (F1) race strategy takes place in a high-pressure and fast-paced environment where split-second decisions can drastically affect race results. Two of the core decisions of race strategy are when to make pit stops (i.e. replace the cars' tyres) and which tyre compounds (hard, medium or soft, in normal conditions) to select. The optimal pit stop decisions can be determined by estimating the tyre degradation of these compounds, which in turn can be computed from the energy applied to each tyre, i.e. the tyre energy. In this work, we trained deep learning models, using the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 team's historic race data consisting of telemetry, to forecast tyre energies during races. Additionally, we fitted XGBoost, a decision tree-based machine learning algorithm, to the same dataset and compared the results, with both giving impressive performance. Furthermore, we incorporated two different explainable AI methods, namely feature importance and counterfactual explanations, to gain insights into the reasoning behind the forecasts. Our contributions thus result in an explainable, automated method which could assist F1 teams in optimising their race strategy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_04067
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Explainable Time Series Prediction of Tyre Energy in Formula One Race Strategy
Todd, Jamie
Jiang, Junqi
Russo, Aaron
Winkler, Steffen
Sale, Stuart
McMillan, Joseph
Rago, Antonio
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Formula One (F1) race strategy takes place in a high-pressure and fast-paced environment where split-second decisions can drastically affect race results. Two of the core decisions of race strategy are when to make pit stops (i.e. replace the cars' tyres) and which tyre compounds (hard, medium or soft, in normal conditions) to select. The optimal pit stop decisions can be determined by estimating the tyre degradation of these compounds, which in turn can be computed from the energy applied to each tyre, i.e. the tyre energy. In this work, we trained deep learning models, using the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 team's historic race data consisting of telemetry, to forecast tyre energies during races. Additionally, we fitted XGBoost, a decision tree-based machine learning algorithm, to the same dataset and compared the results, with both giving impressive performance. Furthermore, we incorporated two different explainable AI methods, namely feature importance and counterfactual explanations, to gain insights into the reasoning behind the forecasts. Our contributions thus result in an explainable, automated method which could assist F1 teams in optimising their race strategy.
title Explainable Time Series Prediction of Tyre Energy in Formula One Race Strategy
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04067