The Sea Exploration Problem: Data-driven Orienteering on a Continuous
  Surface
  This paper describes a problem arising in sea exploration, where the aim is
to schedule the expedition of a ship for collecting information about the
resources on the seafloor. The aim is to collect data by probing on a set of
carefully chosen locations, so that the information available is optimally
enriched. This problem has similarities with the orienteering problem, where
the aim is to plan a time-limited trip for visiting a set of vertices,
collecting a prize at each of them, in such a way that the total value
collected is maximum. In our problem, the score at each vertex is associated
with an estimation of the level of the resource on the given surface, which is
done by regression using Gaussian processes. Hence, there is a correlation
among scores on the selected vertices; this is a first difference with respect
to the standard orienteering problem. The second difference is the location of
each vertex, which in our problem is a freely chosen point on a given surface.
