Title
POMDPs in Continuous Time and Discrete Spaces
Abstract
Many processes, such as discrete event systems in engineering or population dynamics in biology, evolve in discrete space and continuous time. We consider the problem of optimal decision making in such discrete state and action space systems under partial observability. This places our work at the intersection of optimal filtering and optimal control. At the current state of research, a mathematical description for simultaneous decision making and filtering in continuous time with finite countable state and action spaces is still missing. In this paper, we give a mathematical description of a continuous-time POMDP. By leveraging optimal filtering theory we derive a HJB type equation that characterizes the optimal solution. Using techniques from deep learning we approximately solve the resulting partial integro-differential equation. We present (i) an approach solving the decision problem offline by learning an approximation of the value function and (ii) an online algorithm which provides a solution in belief space using deep reinforcement learning. We show the applicability on a set of toy examples which pave the way for future methods providing solutions for high dimensional problems.
Year
Venue
DocType
2020
NIPS 2020
Conference
Volume
Citations 
PageRank 
33
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bastian Alt133.81
Matthias Schultheis200.68
Heinz Koeppl315936.18