Related papers: Positive Dynamic Programming: A Critique
This paper build on our recent work where we presented a dual stochastic optimal control formulation of the nonlinear filtering problem [1]. The constraint for the dual problem is a backward stochastic differential equations (BSDE). The…
Recent work [Ran22] formulated a class of optimal control problems involving positive linear systems, linear stage costs, and elementwise constraints on control. It was shown that the problem admits linear optimal cost and the associated…
The principle of optimality is a fundamental aspect of dynamic programming, which states that the optimal solution to a dynamic optimization problem can be found by combining the optimal solutions to its sub-problems. While this principle…
In the theory of dynamic programming, an optimal policy is a policy whose lifetime value dominates that of all other policies from every possible initial condition in the state space. This raises a natural question: when does optimality…
Differential Dynamic Programming is an optimal control technique often used for trajectory generation. Many variations of this algorithm have been developed in the literature, including algorithms for stochastic dynamics or state and input…
For sequential stochastic control problems with standard Borel measurement and control action spaces, we introduce a general (universally applicable) dynamic programming formulation, establish its well-posedness, and provide new existence…
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…
This paper considers an optimal impulse control problem of dynamical systems generated by a flow. The performance criteria are total costs over the infinite time horizon. Apart from the main performance to be minimized, there are multiple…
This paper provides new conditions for dynamic optimality in discrete time and uses them to establish fundamental dynamic programming results for several commonly used recursive preference specifications. These include Epstein-Zin…
Approximate dynamic programming has been investigated and used as a method to approximately solve optimal regulation problems. However, the extension of this technique to optimal tracking problems for continuous time nonlinear systems has…
The aim of this paper is to address optimality of stochastic control strategies via dynamic programming subject to total variation distance ambiguity on the conditional distribution of the controlled process. We formulate the stochastic…
We consider an optimal stopping problem where a constraint is placed on the distribution of the stopping time. Reformulating the problem in terms of so-called measure-valued martingales allows us to transform the marginal constraint into an…
We consider a broad class of dynamic programming (DP) problems that involve a partially linear structure and some positivity properties in their system equation and cost function. We address deterministic and stochastic problems, possibly…
Approximate dynamic programming is a popular method for solving large Markov decision processes. This paper describes a new class of approximate dynamic programming (ADP) methods- distributionally robust ADP-that address the curse of…
This paper presents a new theory, known as robust dynamic pro- gramming, for a class of continuous-time dynamical systems. Different from traditional dynamic programming (DP) methods, this new theory serves as a fundamental tool to analyze…
Trajectory following is one of the complicated control problems when its dynamics are nonlinear, stochastic and include a large number of parameters. The problem has significant difficulties including a large number of trials required for…
This paper studies the robust optimal control design for uncertain nonlinear systems from a perspective of robust adaptive dynamic programming (robust-ADP). The objective is to fill up a gap in the past literature of ADP where dynamic…
Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) has become a well established method for unconstrained trajectory optimization. Despite its several applications in robotics and controls however, a widely successful constrained version of the…
Optimal control problems driven by evolutionary partial differential equations arise in many industrial applications and their numerical solution is known to be a challenging problem. One approach to obtain an optimal feedback control is…
We consider approximate dynamic programming for the infinite-horizon stationary $\gamma$-discounted optimal control problem formalized by Markov Decision Processes. While in the exact case it is known that there always exists an optimal…