Related papers: On Optimal Control of Discounted Cost Infinite-Hor…
This article presents a constrained policy optimization approach for the optimal control of systems under nonstationary uncertainties. We introduce an assumption that we call Markov embeddability that allows us to cast the stochastic…
The article poses a general model for optimal control subject to information constraints, motivated in part by recent work of Sims and others on information-constrained decision-making by economic agents. In the average-cost optimal control…
Making optimal decisions under uncertainty is a shared problem among distinct fields. While optimal control is commonly studied in the framework of dynamic programming, it is approached with differing perspectives of the Bellman optimality…
This paper deals with unconstrained discounted continuous-time Markov decision processes in Borel state and action spaces. Under some conditions imposed on the primitives, allowing unbounded transition rates and unbounded (from both above…
In this paper we consider a control problem for a Partially Observable Piecewise Deterministic Markov Process of the following type: After the jump of the process the controller receives a noisy signal about the state and the aim is to…
We describe an algorithm to solve Bellman optimization that replaces a sum over paths determining the optimal cost-to-go by an analytic method localized in state space. Our approach follows from the established relation between stochastic…
The objective of this work is to study continuous-time Markov decision processes on a general Borel state space with both impulsive and continuous controls for the infinite-time horizon discounted cost. The continuous-time controlled…
We consider the problem of controlling a fully specified Markov decision process (MDP), also known as the planning problem, when the state space is very large and calculating the optimal policy is intractable. Instead, we pursue the more…
We consider the problem of discounted optimal state-feedback regulation for general unknown deterministic discrete-time systems. It is well known that open-loop instability of systems, non-quadratic cost functions and complex nonlinear…
In this paper we consider a broad class of infinite horizon discrete-time optimal control models that involve a nonnegative cost function and an affine mapping in their dynamic programming equation. They include as special cases classical…
Autonomous systems often have logical constraints arising, for example, from safety, operational, or regulatory requirements. Such constraints can be expressed using temporal logic specifications. The system state is often partially…
Markov decision problems are most commonly solved via dynamic programming. Another approach is Bellman residual minimization, which directly minimizes the squared Bellman residual objective function. However, compared to dynamic…
Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) is highly intractable in general, at least in part because the optimal policy may be infinitely large. In this paper, we explore the problem of finding the optimal policy from…
In this paper, we address a social planner's optimal control problem for a partially observable stochastic epidemic model. The control measures include social distancing, testing, and vaccination. Using a diffusion approximation for the…
We consider the problem of optimally controlling stochastic, Markovian systems subject to joint chance constraints over a finite-time horizon. For such problems, standard Dynamic Programming is inapplicable due to the time correlation of…
In many practical sequential decision-making problems, tracking the state of the environment incurs a sensing/communication/computation cost. In these settings, the agent's interaction with its environment includes the additional component…
Models of many real-life applications, such as queuing models of communication networks or computing systems, have a countably infinite state-space. Algorithmic and learning procedures that have been developed to produce optimal policies…
We present a dynamic programming-based solution to a stochastic optimal control problem up to a hitting time for a discrete-time Markov control process. Firstly, we determine an optimal control policy to steer the process toward a compact…
One often encounters the curse of dimensionality in the application of dynamic programming to determine optimal policies for controlled Markov chains. In this paper, we provide a method to construct sub-optimal policies along with a bound…
In this paper, we consider discrete-time infinite horizon problems of optimal control to a terminal set of states. These are the problems that are often taken as the starting point for adaptive dynamic programming. Under very general…