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Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) offer a principled formalism for planning under state and transition uncertainty. Despite advances made towards solving large POMDPs, obtaining performant policies under limited…
Civil and maritime engineering systems, among others, from bridges to offshore platforms and wind turbines, must be efficiently managed as they are exposed to deterioration mechanisms throughout their operational life, such as fatigue or…
In many practical settings control decisions must be made under partial/imperfect information about the evolution of a relevant state variable. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) is a relatively well-developed framework…
Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) describes a process for inferring quantifiable metrics of structural condition, which can serve as input to support decisions on the operation and maintenance of infrastructure assets. Given the long…
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide an elegant mathematical framework for modeling complex decision and planning problems in stochastic domains in which states of the system are observable only indirectly, via a…
This article provides an introductory tutorial on structural results in partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs). Typically, computing the optimal policy of a POMDP is computationally intractable. We use lattice program- ming…
Autonomous systems are often required to operate in partially observable environments. They must reliably execute a specified objective even with incomplete information about the state of the environment. We propose a methodology to…
In medical decision making, we have to choose among several expensive diagnostic tests such that the certainty about a patient's health is maximized while remaining within the bounds of resources like time and money. The expected increase…
In many engineering systems, proper predictive maintenance and operational control are essential to increase efficiency and reliability while reducing maintenance costs. However, one of the major challenges is that many sensors are used for…
We consider a simple discrete-time controlled queueing system, where the controller has a choice of which server to use at each time slot and server performance varies according to a Markov modulated random environment. We explore the role…
Decision makers involved in the management of civil assets and systems usually take actions under constraints imposed by societal regulations. Some of these constraints are related to epistemic quantities, as the probability of failure…
Optimal decision-making presents a significant challenge for autonomous systems operating in uncertain, stochastic and time-varying environments. Environmental variability over time can significantly impact the system's optimal decision…
We consider partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with a set of target states and positive integer costs associated with every transition. The traditional optimization objective (stochastic shortest path) asks to minimize…
This paper develops computable metrics to assign priorities for information collection on network systems made up by binary components. Components are worth inspecting because their condition state is uncertain and the system functioning…
Noisy sensing, imperfect control, and environment changes are defining characteristics of many real-world robot tasks. The partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) provides a principled mathematical framework for modeling and…
Many processes, such as discrete event systems in engineering or population dynamics in biology, evolve in discrete space and continuous time. We consider the problem of optimal decision making in such discrete state and action space…
Active classification, i.e., the sequential decision-making process aimed at data acquisition for classification purposes, arises naturally in many applications, including medical diagnosis, intrusion detection, and object tracking. In this…
We consider the problem of approximate belief-state monitoring using particle filtering for the purposes of implementing a policy for a partially-observable Markov decision process (POMDP). While particle filtering has become a widely-used…
We consider the problem belief-state monitoring for the purposes of implementing a policy for a partially-observable Markov decision process (POMDP), specifically how one might approximate the belief state. Other schemes for belief-state…
Online planning under uncertainty in partially observable domains is an essential capability in robotics and AI. The partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) is a mathematically principled framework for addressing…