Related papers: Stochastic Control for Organ Donations: A Review

The online Markov decision process (MDP) is a generalization of the classical Markov decision process that incorporates changing reward functions. In this paper, we propose practical online MDP algorithms with policy iteration and…

We study policy optimization problems for deterministic Markov decision processes (MDPs) with metric state and action spaces, which we refer to as Metric Policy Optimization Problems (MPOPs). Our goal is to establish theoretical results on…

Markov Decision Processes (Mdps) form a versatile framework used to model a wide range of optimization problems. The Mdp model consists of sets of states, actions, time steps, rewards, and probability transitions. When in a given state and…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a popular model for decision-making in the presence of uncertainty. The conventional view of MDPs in verification treats them as state transformers with probabilities defined over sequences of states and…

Planning for distributed agents with partial state information is considered from a decision- theoretic perspective. We describe generalizations of both the MDP and POMDP models that allow for decentralized control. For even a small number…

We treat the problem of risk-aware control for stochastic shortest path (SSP) on Markov decision processes (MDP). Typically, expectation is considered for SSP, which however is oblivious to the incurred risk. We present an alternative view,…

We consider finite model approximations of discrete-time partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) under the discounted cost criterion. After converting the original partially observed stochastic control problem to a fully…

We study an optimal process control problem with multiple assignable causes. The process is initially in-control but is subject to random transition to one of multiple out-of-control states due to assignable causes. The objective is to find…

In this paper, we consider the problem of real-time transmission scheduling over time-varying channels. We first formulate the transmission scheduling problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) and systematically unravel the structural…

A Markov decision process (MDP) framework is adopted to represent ensemble control of devices with cyclic energy consumption patterns, e.g., thermostatically controlled loads. Specifically we utilize and develop the class of MDP models…

Markov decision process (MDP) is a decision making framework where a decision maker is interested in maximizing the expected discounted value of a stream of rewards received at future stages at various states which are visited according to…

In this paper, we show how a simulated Markov decision process (MDP) built by the so-called \emph{baseline} policies, can be used to compute a different policy, namely the \emph{simulated optimal} policy, for which the performance of this…

As pressure on the healthcare system increases, patients that require elective surgery experience longer access times to pre- and post-operative appointments and surgery. Hospitals can control their waiting lists by allocating timeslots to…

Designing control policies for large, distributed systems is challenging, especially in the context of critical, temporal logic based specifications (e.g., safety) that must be met with high probability. Compositional methods for such…

The distributionally robust Markov Decision Process (MDP) approach asks for a distributionally robust policy that achieves the maximal expected total reward under the most adversarial distribution of uncertain parameters. In this paper, we…

We consider a class of optimization problems over stochastic variables where the algorithm can learn information about the value of any variable through a series of costly steps; we model this information acquisition process as a Markov…

Many applications -- including power systems, robotics, and economics -- involve a dynamical system interacting with a stochastic and hard-to-model environment. We adopt a reinforcement learning approach to control such systems.…

We investigate partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with cost functions regularized by entropy terms describing state, observation, and control uncertainty. Standard POMDP techniques are shown to offer bounded-error…

In this paper, we consider an integrated MSP-MDP framework which captures features of Markov decision process (MDP) and multistage stochastic programming (MSP). The integrated framework allows one to study a dynamic decision-making process…

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a standard model for sequential decision-making problems and are widely used across many scientific areas, including formal methods and artificial intelligence (AI). MDPs do, however, come with the…