Engineering topics

Meuleau, Nicholas

Publications and source records attributed to Meuleau, Nicholas.

2 records

NASA NTRS2004

Dynamic Programming for Structured Continuous Markov Decision Problems

We describe an approach for exploiting structure in Markov Decision Processes with continuous state variables. At each step of the dynamic programming, the state space is dynamically partitioned into regions where the value function is the same throughout the region. We first describe the algorithm for piecewise constant representations. We then extend it to piecewise linear representations, using techniques from POMDPs to represent and reason about linear surfaces efficiently. We show that for complex, structured problems, our approach exploits the natural structure so that optimal solutions can be computed efficiently.

Dearden, Richard↗

NASA NTRS2003

Hybrid Discrete-Continuous Markov Decision Processes

This paper proposes a Markov decision process (MDP) model that features both discrete and continuous state variables. We extend previous work by Boyan and Littman on the mono-dimensional time-dependent MDP to multiple dimensions. We present the principle of lazy discretization, and piecewise constant and linear approximations of the model. Having to deal with several continuous dimensions raises several new problems that require new solutions. In the (piecewise) linear case, we use techniques from partially- observable MDPs (POMDPS) to represent value functions as sets of linear functions attached to different partitions of the state space.

Feng, Zhengzhu↗