Related papers: Risk-Averse Stochastic Shortest Path Planning
Safety in stochastic control systems, which are subject to random noise with a known probability distribution, aims to compute policies that satisfy predefined operational constraints with high confidence throughout the uncertain evolution…
This dissertation makes three main contributions. First, We identify a new connection between policy gradient and dynamic programming in MMDPs and propose the Coordinate Ascent Dynamic Programming (CADP) algorithm to compute a Markov policy…
Optimizing risk-averse objectives in discounted MDPs is challenging because most models do not admit direct dynamic programming equations and require complex history-dependent policies. In this paper, we show that the risk-averse {\em total…
There are no computationally feasible algorithms that provide solutions to the finite horizon Risk-sensitive Constrained Markov Decision Process (Risk-CMDP) problem, even for problems with moderate horizon. With an aim to design the same,…
Integrated task and motion planning has emerged as a challenging problem in sequential decision making, where a robot needs to compute high-level strategy and low-level motion plans for solving complex tasks. While high-level strategies…
Risk-sensitive planning aims to identify policies maximizing some tail-focused metrics in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Such an optimization task can be very costly for the most widely used and interpretable metrics such as threshold…
Given the rapid advances in unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, and increasing need to monitor traffic at a city level, one of the current research gaps is how to systematically deploy drones over multiple periods. We propose a real-time…
The parameters for a Markov Decision Process (MDP) often cannot be specified exactly. Uncertain MDPs (UMDPs) capture this model ambiguity by defining sets which the parameters belong to. Minimax regret has been proposed as an objective for…
In this work, we study discrete-time Markov decision processes (MDPs) under constraints with Borel state and action spaces and where all the performance functions have the same form of the expected total reward (ETR) criterion over the…
We consider a control problem for a finite-state Markov system whose performance is evaluated by a coherent Markov risk measure. For each policy, the risk of a state is approximated by a function of its features, thus leading to a…
It was recently shown that dynamic programming (DP) methods for finding static CVaR-optimal policies in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) can fail when based on the dual formulation, yet the root cause of this failure remains unclear. We…
Constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs) are used as a decision-making framework to study the long-run performance of a stochastic system. It is well-known that a stationary optimal policy of a CMDP problem under discounted cost…
In this paper, we present performance estimates for stochastic economic MPC schemes with risk-averse cost formulations. For MPC algorithms with costs given by the expectation of stage cost evaluated in random variables, it was recently…
We consider infinite-horizon Markov Decision Processes where parameters, such as transition probabilities, are unknown and estimated from data. The popular distributionally robust approach to addressing the parameter uncertainty can…
This paper studies convergence properties of optimal values and actions for discounted and average-cost Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with weakly continuous transition probabilities and applies these properties to the stochastic…
In this paper we consider shortest path problems in a directed graph where the transitions between nodes are subject to uncertainty. We use a minimax formulation, where the objective is to guarantee that a special destination state is…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) offer a fairly generic and powerful framework to discuss the notion of optimal policies for dynamic systems, in particular when the dynamics are stochastic. However, computing the optimal policy of an MDP…
The paper deals with finite-state Markov decision processes (MDPs) with integer weights assigned to each state-action pair. New algorithms are presented to classify end components according to their limiting behavior with respect to the…
We use one-step conditional risk mappings to formulate a risk averse version of a total cost problem on a controlled Markov process in discrete time infinite horizon. The nonnegative one step costs are assumed to be lower semi-continuous…
Following the occurrence of an extreme natural or man-made event, community recovery management should aim at providing optimal restoration policies for a community over a planning horizon. Calculating such optimal restoration polices in…