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This paper proposes an algorithm to efficiently solve multistage stochastic programs with block separable recourse where each recourse problem is a multistage stochastic program with stage-wise independent uncertainty. The algorithm first…
It is well known that for any finite state Markov decision process (MDP) there is a memoryless deterministic policy that maximizes the expected reward. For partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), optimal memoryless policies…
Distributed algorithms for solving coupled semidefinite programs (SDPs) commonly require many iterations to converge. They also put high computational demand on the computational agents. In this paper we show that in case the coupled…
The ability to compute reward-optimal policies for given and known finite Markov decision processes (MDPs) underpins a variety of applications across planning, controller synthesis, and verification. However, we often want policies (1) to…
Monte Carlo methods -- such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and piecewise deterministic Markov process (PDMP) samplers -- provide asymptotically exact estimators of expectations under a target distribution. There is growing interest in…
The key to Black-Box Optimization is to efficiently search through input regions with potentially widely-varying numerical properties, to achieve low-regret descent and fast progress toward the optima. Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) methods…
Dynamic job shop scheduling, a fundamental combinatorial optimisation problem in various industrial sectors, poses substantial challenges for effective scheduling due to frequent disruptions caused by the arrival of new jobs.…
We study the sequential decision-making problem of allocating a limited resource to agents that reveal their stochastic demands on arrival over a finite horizon. Our goal is to design fair allocation algorithms that exhaust the available…
The problem of synthesizing stochastic explicit model predictive control policies is known to be quickly intractable even for systems of modest complexity when using classical control-theoretic methods. To address this challenge, we present…
A novel reinforcement learning scheme to synthesize policies for continuous-space Markov decision processes (MDPs) is proposed. This scheme enables one to apply model-free, off-the-shelf reinforcement learning algorithms for finite MDPs to…
In this paper, we study multistage stochastic mixed-integer nonlinear programs (MS-MINLP). This general class of problems encompasses, as important special cases, multistage stochastic convex optimization with non-Lipschitzian value…
Robust Markov decision processes (r-MDPs) extend MDPs by explicitly modelling epistemic uncertainty about transition dynamics. Learning r-MDPs from interactions with an unknown environment enables the synthesis of robust policies with…
We introduce and analyze a parallel sequential Monte Carlo methodology for the numerical solution of optimization problems that involve the minimization of a cost function that consists of the sum of many individual components. The proposed…
We consider the constrained optimal control problem for the gradual-impulsive CTMDP model with the performance criteria being the expected total undiscounted costs (from the running cost and the cost from each time an impulse being…
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms provide a very general recipe for estimating properties of complicated distributions. While their use has become commonplace and there is a large literature on MCMC theory and practice, MCMC users…
Stochastic dual dynamic programming (SDDP) is a state-of-the-art method for solving multi-stage stochastic optimization, widely used for modeling real-world process optimization tasks. Unfortunately, SDDP has a worst-case complexity that…
A large class of decision making under uncertainty problems can be described via Markov decision processes (MDPs) or partially observable MDPs (POMDPs), with application to artificial intelligence and operations research, among others.…
This paper investigates the optimization problem of an infinite stage discrete time Markov decision process (MDP) with a long-run average metric considering both mean and variance of rewards together. Such performance metric is important…
Binary optimization has a wide range of applications in combinatorial optimization problems such as MaxCut, MIMO detection, and MaxSAT. However, these problems are typically NP-hard due to the binary constraints. We develop a novel…
We show fundamental properties of the Markov semigroup of recently proposed MCMC algorithms based on Piecewise-deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) such as the Bouncy Particle Sampler, the Zig-Zag process or the Randomized Hamiltonian…