English

A Linear Programming Relaxation and a Heuristic for the Restless Bandit Problem with General Switching Costs

Optimization and Control 2008-05-13 v1

Abstract

We extend a relaxation technique due to Bertsimas and Nino-Mora for the restless bandit problem to the case where arbitrary costs penalize switching between the bandits. We also construct a one-step lookahead policy using the solution of the relaxation. Computational experiments and a bound for approximate dynamic programming provide some empirical support for the heuristic.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0805.1563,
  title  = {A Linear Programming Relaxation and a Heuristic for the Restless Bandit Problem with General Switching Costs},
  author = {Jerome Le Ny and Munther Dahleh and Eric Feron},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0805.1563},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

17 pages, 1 table

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:39:22.204Z