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Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) have been used to formulate many decision-making problems in science and engineering. The objective is to synthesize the best decision (action selection) policies to maximize expected rewards (or minimize…
Distributed algorithms for solving additive or consensus optimization problems commonly rely on first-order or proximal splitting methods. These algorithms generally come with restrictive assumptions and at best enjoy a linear convergence…
For a given problem, the optimal Markov policy can be considerred as a conditional or contingent plan containing a (potentially large) number of branches. Unfortunately, there are applications where it is desirable to strictly limit the…
This paper addresses the problem of optimal control of robotic sensing systems aimed at autonomous information gathering in scenarios such as environmental monitoring, search and rescue, and surveillance and reconnaissance. The information…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are the defacto frame-work for sequential decision making in the presence ofstochastic uncertainty. A classical optimization criterion forMDPs is to maximize the expected discounted-sum pay-off, which…
Motivated by time-sensitive e-service applications, we consider the design of effective policies in a Markovian model for the dynamic control of both admission and routing of a single class of real-time transactions to multiple…
In this paper, we provide a novel algorithm for solving planning and learning problems of Markov decision processes. The proposed algorithm follows a policy iteration-type update by using a rank-one approximation of the transition…
The paper presents the vehicles integrated monitoring system giving priorities for emergency vehicles. The described system exploits the data gathered by: geographical positioning systems and geographical information systems. The digital…
We study the policy testing problem in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the fixed-confidence setting under a generative model with static sampling. The goal is to decide whether the value of a given policy exceeds a specified…
In this paper, a nurse-scheduling model is developed using mixed integer programming model. It is deployed to a general care ward to replace and automate the current manual approach for scheduling. The developed model differs from other…
Influence Diagrams (ID) are a flexible tool to represent discrete stochastic optimization problems, including Markov Decision Process (MDP) and Partially Observable MDP as standard examples. More precisely, given random variables considered…
Model-based development is a widely-used method to describe complex systems that enables the rapid prototyping. Advances in the science of distributed systems has led to the development of large scale statechart models which are distributed…
Decision-making problems in uncertain or stochastic domains are often formulated as Markov decision processes (MDPs). Policy iteration (PI) is a popular algorithm for searching over policy-space, the size of which is exponential in the…
In parameter estimation problems one computes a posterior distribution over uncertain parameters defined jointly by a prior distribution, a model, and noisy data. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is often used for the numerical solution of…
The operation of an ambulance fleet involves ambulance selection decisions about which ambulance to dispatch to each emergency, and ambulance reassignment decisions about what each ambulance should do after it has finished the service…
Mixed-Integer Second-Order Cone Programs (MISOCPs) form a nice class of mixed-inter convex programs, which can be solved very efficiently due to the recent advances in optimization solvers. Our paper bridges the gap between modeling a class…
We consider experiments for comparing treatments using units that are ordered linearly over time or space within blocks. In addition to the block effect, we assume that a trend effect influences the response. The latter is modeled as a…
We consider multi-dimensional Markov decision processes and formulate a long term discounted reward optimization problem. Two simulation based algorithms---Monte Carlo rollout policy and parallel rollout policy are studied, and various…
This paper studies temporal planning in probabilistic environments, modeled as labeled Markov decision processes (MDPs), with user preferences over multiple temporal goals. Existing works reflect such preferences as a prioritized list of…
Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…