Download or read book Continuous Time Markov Decision Processes written by Xianping Guo and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-09-18 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Continuous-time Markov decision processes (MDPs), also known as controlled Markov chains, are used for modeling decision-making problems that arise in operations research (for instance, inventory, manufacturing, and queueing systems), computer science, communications engineering, control of populations (such as fisheries and epidemics), and management science, among many other fields. This volume provides a unified, systematic, self-contained presentation of recent developments on the theory and applications of continuous-time MDPs. The MDPs in this volume include most of the cases that arise in applications, because they allow unbounded transition and reward/cost rates. Much of the material appears for the first time in book form.

Download or read book Continuous Time Markov Decision Processes written by Xianping Guo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-03-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Continuous-time Markov decision processes (MDPs), also known as controlled Markov chains, are used for modeling decision-making problems that arise in operations research (for instance, inventory, manufacturing, and queueing systems), computer science, communications engineering, control of populations (such as fisheries and epidemics), and management science, among many other fields. This volume provides a unified, systematic, self-contained presentation of recent developments on the theory and applications of continuous-time MDPs. The MDPs in this volume include most of the cases that arise in applications, because they allow unbounded transition and reward/cost rates. Much of the material appears for the first time in book form.

Download or read book Continuous Time Markov Decision Processes written by Xianping Guo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-04-29 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Continuous-time Markov decision processes (MDPs), also known as controlled Markov chains, are used for modeling decision-making problems that arise in operations research (for instance, inventory, manufacturing, and queueing systems), computer science, communications engineering, control of populations (such as fisheries and epidemics), and management science, among many other fields. This volume provides a unified, systematic, self-contained presentation of recent developments on the theory and applications of continuous-time MDPs. The MDPs in this volume include most of the cases that arise in applications, because they allow unbounded transition and reward/cost rates. Much of the material appears for the first time in book form.

Download or read book Markov Decision Processes written by Martin L. Puterman and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-08-28 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wiley-Interscience Paperback Series consists of selected books that have been made more accessible to consumers in an effort to increase global appeal and general circulation. With these new unabridged softcover volumes, Wiley hopes to extend the lives of these works by making them available to future generations of statisticians, mathematicians, and scientists. "This text is unique in bringing together so many results hitherto found only in part in other texts and papers. . . . The text is fairly self-contained, inclusive of some basic mathematical results needed, and provides a rich diet of examples, applications, and exercises. The bibliographical material at the end of each chapter is excellent, not only from a historical perspective, but because it is valuable for researchers in acquiring a good perspective of the MDP research potential." —Zentralblatt fur Mathematik ". . . it is of great value to advanced-level students, researchers, and professional practitioners of this field to have now a complete volume (with more than 600 pages) devoted to this topic. . . . Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming represents an up-to-date, unified, and rigorous treatment of theoretical and computational aspects of discrete-time Markov decision processes." —Journal of the American Statistical Association

Download or read book Selected Topics on Continuous Time Controlled Markov Chains and Markov Games written by Tomás Prieto-Rumeau and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2012-03-16 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book concerns continuous-time controlled Markov chains, also known as continuous-time Markov decision processes. They form a class of stochastic control problems in which a single decision-maker wishes to optimize a given objective function. This book is also concerned with Markov games, where two decision-makers (or players) try to optimize their own objective function. Both decision-making processes appear in a large number of applications in economics, operations research, engineering, and computer science, among other areas. An extensive, self-contained, up-to-date analysis of basic optimality criteria (such as discounted and average reward), and advanced optimality criteria (e.g., bias, overtaking, sensitive discount, and Blackwell optimality) is presented. A particular emphasis is made on the application of the results herein: algorithmic and computational issues are discussed, and applications to population models and epidemic processes are shown. This book is addressed to students and researchers in the fields of stochastic control and stochastic games. Moreover, it could be of interest also to undergraduate and beginning graduate students because the reader is not supposed to have a high mathematical background: a working knowledge of calculus, linear algebra, probability, and continuous-time Markov chains should suffice to understand the contents of the book. Contents:IntroductionControlled Markov ChainsBasic Optimality CriteriaPolicy Iteration and Approximation TheoremsOvertaking, Bias, and Variance OptimalitySensitive Discount OptimalityBlackwell OptimalityConstrained Controlled Markov ChainsApplicationsZero-Sum Markov GamesBias and Overtaking Equilibria for Markov Games Readership: Graduate students and researchers in the fields of stochastic control and stochastic analysis. Keywords:Markov Decision Processes;Continuous-Time Controlled Markov Chains;Stochastic Dynamic Programming;Stochastic GamesKey Features:This book presents a reader-friendly, extensive, self-contained, and up-to-date analysis of advanced optimality criteria for continuous-time controlled Markov chains and Markov games. Most of the material herein is quite recent (it has been published in high-impact journals during the last five years) and it appears in book form for the first timeThis book introduces approximation theorems which, in particular, allow the reader to obtain numerical approximations of the solution to several control problems of practical interest. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such computational issues are studied for denumerable state continuous-time controlled Markov chains. Hence, the book has an adequate balance between, on the one hand, theoretical results and, on the other hand, applications and computational issuesThe books that analyze continuous-time controlled Markov chains usually restrict themselves to the case of bounded transition and reward rates, which can be reduced to discrete-time models by using the uniformization technique. In our case, however, the transition and the reward rates might be unbounded, and so the uniformization technique cannot be used. By the way, let us mention that in models of practical interest the transition and the reward rates are, typically, unboundedReviews:“The book contains a large number of recent research results on CMCs and Markov games and puts them in perspective. It is written in a very conscious manner, contains detailed proofs of all main results, as well as extensive bibliographic remarks. The book is a very valuable piece of work for researchers on continuous-time CMCs and Markov games.”Zentralblatt MATH

Download or read book Markov Decision Processes with Their Applications written by Qiying Hu and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-09-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Put together by two top researchers in the Far East, this text examines Markov Decision Processes - also called stochastic dynamic programming - and their applications in the optimal control of discrete event systems, optimal replacement, and optimal allocations in sequential online auctions. This dynamic new book offers fresh applications of MDPs in areas such as the control of discrete event systems and the optimal allocations in sequential online auctions.

Download or read book Continuous Time Markov Chains and Applications written by G. George Yin and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-11-14 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gives a systematic treatment of singularly perturbed systems that naturally arise in control and optimization, queueing networks, manufacturing systems, and financial engineering. It presents results on asymptotic expansions of solutions of Komogorov forward and backward equations, properties of functional occupation measures, exponential upper bounds, and functional limit results for Markov chains with weak and strong interactions. To bridge the gap between theory and applications, a large portion of the book is devoted to applications in controlled dynamic systems, production planning, and numerical methods for controlled Markovian systems with large-scale and complex structures in the real-world problems. This second edition has been updated throughout and includes two new chapters on asymptotic expansions of solutions for backward equations and hybrid LQG problems. The chapters on analytic and probabilistic properties of two-time-scale Markov chains have been almost completely rewritten and the notation has been streamlined and simplified. This book is written for applied mathematicians, engineers, operations researchers, and applied scientists. Selected material from the book can also be used for a one semester advanced graduate-level course in applied probability and stochastic processes.

Download or read book Modeling Stochastic Control Optimization and Applications written by George Yin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-07-16 with total page 599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume collects papers, based on invited talks given at the IMA workshop in Modeling, Stochastic Control, Optimization, and Related Applications, held at the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, University of Minnesota, during May and June, 2018. There were four week-long workshops during the conference. They are (1) stochastic control, computation methods, and applications, (2) queueing theory and networked systems, (3) ecological and biological applications, and (4) finance and economics applications. For broader impacts, researchers from different fields covering both theoretically oriented and application intensive areas were invited to participate in the conference. It brought together researchers from multi-disciplinary communities in applied mathematics, applied probability, engineering, biology, ecology, and networked science, to review, and substantially update most recent progress. As an archive, this volume presents some of the highlights of the workshops, and collect papers covering a broad range of topics.

Download or read book Computer Performance Engineering written by Philipp Reinecke and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th EuropeanWorkshop on Computer Performance Engineering, EPEW 2017, held in Berlin,Germany, in September 2017. The 18 papers presented together with the abstracts of two invited talks in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 30 submissions. The papers presented at the workshop reflect the diversity of modern performanceengineering, with topics ranging from advances in Markov models; advances in quantitative analysis; model checking; and cyber-physical systems to performance, energy and security.

Download or read book Constrained Markov Decision Processes written by Eitan Altman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a unified approach for the study of constrained Markov decision processes with a finite state space and unbounded costs. Unlike the single controller case considered in many other books, the author considers a single controller with several objectives, such as minimizing delays and loss, probabilities, and maximization of throughputs. It is desirable to design a controller that minimizes one cost objective, subject to inequality constraints on other cost objectives. This framework describes dynamic decision problems arising frequently in many engineering fields. A thorough overview of these applications is presented in the introduction. The book is then divided into three sections that build upon each other.

Download or read book Markov Processes for Stochastic Modeling written by Oliver Ibe and published by Newnes. This book was released on 2013-05-22 with total page 515 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Markov processes are processes that have limited memory. In particular, their dependence on the past is only through the previous state. They are used to model the behavior of many systems including communications systems, transportation networks, image segmentation and analysis, biological systems and DNA sequence analysis, random atomic motion and diffusion in physics, social mobility, population studies, epidemiology, animal and insect migration, queueing systems, resource management, dams, financial engineering, actuarial science, and decision systems. Covering a wide range of areas of application of Markov processes, this second edition is revised to highlight the most important aspects as well as the most recent trends and applications of Markov processes. The author spent over 16 years in the industry before returning to academia, and he has applied many of the principles covered in this book in multiple research projects. Therefore, this is an applications-oriented book that also includes enough theory to provide a solid ground in the subject for the reader. Presents both the theory and applications of the different aspects of Markov processes Includes numerous solved examples as well as detailed diagrams that make it easier to understand the principle being presented Discusses different applications of hidden Markov models, such as DNA sequence analysis and speech analysis.

Download or read book Continuous Time Markov Decision Processes written by Alexey Piunovskiy and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-11-09 with total page 605 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a systematic and rigorous treatment of continuous-time Markov decision processes, covering both theory and possible applications to queueing systems, epidemiology, finance, and other fields. Unlike most books on the subject, much attention is paid to problems with functional constraints and the realizability of strategies. Three major methods of investigations are presented, based on dynamic programming, linear programming, and reduction to discrete-time problems. Although the main focus is on models with total (discounted or undiscounted) cost criteria, models with average cost criteria and with impulsive controls are also discussed in depth. The book is self-contained. A separate chapter is devoted to Markov pure jump processes and the appendices collect the requisite background on real analysis and applied probability. All the statements in the main text are proved in detail. Researchers and graduate students in applied probability, operational research, statistics and engineering will find this monograph interesting, useful and valuable.

Download or read book Semi Markov Processes written by Franciszek Grabski and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2014-09-25 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Semi-Markov Processes: Applications in System Reliability and Maintenance is a modern view of discrete state space and continuous time semi-Markov processes and their applications in reliability and maintenance. The book explains how to construct semi-Markov models and discusses the different reliability parameters and characteristics that can be obtained from those models. The book is a useful resource for mathematicians, engineering practitioners, and PhD and MSc students who want to understand the basic concepts and results of semi-Markov process theory. Clearly defines the properties and theorems from discrete state Semi-Markov Process (SMP) theory Describes the method behind constructing Semi-Markov (SM) models and SM decision models in the field of reliability and maintenance Provides numerous individual versions of SM models, including the most recent and their impact on system reliability and maintenance

Download or read book Stochastic Optimization in Continuous Time written by Fwu-Ranq Chang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-26 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2004, this is a rigorous but user-friendly book on the application of stochastic control theory to economics. A distinctive feature of the book is that mathematical concepts are introduced in a language and terminology familiar to graduate students of economics. The standard topics of many mathematics, economics and finance books are illustrated with real examples documented in the economic literature. Moreover, the book emphasises the dos and don'ts of stochastic calculus, cautioning the reader that certain results and intuitions cherished by many economists do not extend to stochastic models. A special chapter (Chapter 5) is devoted to exploring various methods of finding a closed-form representation of the value function of a stochastic control problem, which is essential for ascertaining the optimal policy functions. The book also includes many practice exercises for the reader. Notes and suggested readings are provided at the end of each chapter for more references and possible extensions.

Download or read book Partially Observed Markov Decision Processes written by Vikram Krishnamurthy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-21 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering formulation, algorithms, and structural results, and linking theory to real-world applications in controlled sensing (including social learning, adaptive radars and sequential detection), this book focuses on the conceptual foundations of partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs). It emphasizes structural results in stochastic dynamic programming, enabling graduate students and researchers in engineering, operations research, and economics to understand the underlying unifying themes without getting weighed down by mathematical technicalities. Bringing together research from across the literature, the book provides an introduction to nonlinear filtering followed by a systematic development of stochastic dynamic programming, lattice programming and reinforcement learning for POMDPs. Questions addressed in the book include: when does a POMDP have a threshold optimal policy? When are myopic policies optimal? How do local and global decision makers interact in adaptive decision making in multi-agent social learning where there is herding and data incest? And how can sophisticated radars and sensors adapt their sensing in real time?

Download or read book Reinforcement Learning second edition written by Richard S. Sutton and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The significantly expanded and updated new edition of a widely used text on reinforcement learning, one of the most active research areas in artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning, one of the most active research areas in artificial intelligence, is a computational approach to learning whereby an agent tries to maximize the total amount of reward it receives while interacting with a complex, uncertain environment. In Reinforcement Learning, Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto provide a clear and simple account of the field's key ideas and algorithms. This second edition has been significantly expanded and updated, presenting new topics and updating coverage of other topics. Like the first edition, this second edition focuses on core online learning algorithms, with the more mathematical material set off in shaded boxes. Part I covers as much of reinforcement learning as possible without going beyond the tabular case for which exact solutions can be found. Many algorithms presented in this part are new to the second edition, including UCB, Expected Sarsa, and Double Learning. Part II extends these ideas to function approximation, with new sections on such topics as artificial neural networks and the Fourier basis, and offers expanded treatment of off-policy learning and policy-gradient methods. Part III has new chapters on reinforcement learning's relationships to psychology and neuroscience, as well as an updated case-studies chapter including AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero, Atari game playing, and IBM Watson's wagering strategy. The final chapter discusses the future societal impacts of reinforcement learning.

Download or read book Computer Aided Verification written by Werner Damm and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-08-30 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification. Thirty-three state-of-the-technology papers are presented, together with fourteen tool papers, three invited papers, and four invited tutorials. All the current issues in computer aided verification and model checking—from foundational and methodological issues to the evaluation of major tools and systems—are addressed.