Related papers: Dynamic Contracts with Partial Observations: Appli…
We study discrete-time finite-horizon optimal control problems in probability spaces, whereby the state of the system is a probability measure. We show that, in many instances, the solution of dynamic programming in probability spaces…
The ability to accurately predict human behavior is central to the safety and efficiency of robot autonomy in interactive settings. Unfortunately, robots often lack access to key information on which these predictions may hinge, such as…
This paper presents an inverse optimality method to solve the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation for a class of nonlinear problems for which the cost is quadratic and the dynamics are affine in the input. The method is inverse optimal because…
We analyze the optimal delegation problem between a principal and an agent, assuming that the latter has state-independent preferences. We demonstrate that if the principal is more risk-averse than the agent toward non-status quo options,…
This paper introduces a continuous-time constrained nonlinear control scheme which implements a model predictive control strategy as a continuous-time dynamic system. The approach is based on the idea that the solution of the optimal…
The problem of controlling multi-agent systems under different models of information sharing among agents has received significant attention in the recent literature. In this paper, we consider a setup where rather than committing to a…
This paper studies the optimal output-feedback control of a linear time-invariant system where a stochastic event-based scheduler triggers the communication between the sensor and the controller. The primary goal of the use of this type of…
Self-optimizing control is a strategy for selecting controlled variables, where the economic objective guides the selection and design of controlled variables, with the expectation that maintaining the controlled variables at constant…
Contract theory studies how a principal can incentivize agents to exert costly, unobservable effort through performance-based payments. While classical economic models provide elegant characterizations of optimal solutions, modern…
Autonomous systems have witnessed a rapid increase in their capabilities, but it remains a challenge for them to perform tasks both effectively and safely. The fact that performance and safety can sometimes be competing objectives renders…
This paper investigates control laws allowing mobile, autonomous agents to optimally position themselves on the line for distributed sensing in a nonuniform field. We show that a simple static control law, based only on local measurements…
We examine the trade-off between the provision of incentives to exert costly effort (ex-ante moral hazard) and the incentives needed to prevent the agent from manipulating the profit observed by the principal (ex-post moral hazard).…
An optimal control problem described by the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation can be developed into a problem that can be solved by general computational fluid dynamics packages. We describe how this formulation would allow a classical…
When sales of a product are affected by randomness in demand, retailers can use dynamic pricing strategies to maximise their profits. In this article the pricing problem is formulated as a stochastic optimal control problem, where the…
This paper studies the design of optimal proper scoring rules when the principal has partial knowledge of an agent's signal distribution. Recent work characterizes the proper scoring rules that maximize the increase of an agent's payoff…
In this paper, we consider the stochastic optimal control problem for the interacting particle system. We obtain the stochastic maximum principle of the optimal control system by introducing a generalized backward stochastic differential…
This paper considers the distributed robust suboptimal consensus control problem of linear multi-agent systems, with both H2 and H_infty performance requirements. A novel two-step complementary design approach is proposed. In the first…
We study a natural combinatorial single-principal multi-agent contract design problem, in which a principal motivates a team of agents to exert effort toward a given task. At the heart of our model is a reward function, which maps the agent…
Inventory and queueing systems are often designed by controlling weighted combination of some time-averaged performance metrics (like cumulative holding, shortage, server-utilization or congestion costs); but real-world constraints, like…
Recent work [Ran22] formulated a class of optimal control problems involving positive linear systems, linear stage costs, and elementwise constraints on control. It was shown that the problem admits linear optimal cost and the associated…