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A Cross-Entropy Approach to Solving Dec-POMDPs

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Advances in Intelligent and Distributed Computing

Part of the book series: Studies in Computational Intelligence ((SCI,volume 78))

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Abstract

In this paper we focus on distributed multiagent planning under uncertainty. For single-agent planning under uncertainty, the partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) is the dominant model (see [Spaan and Vlassis, 2005] and references therein). Recently, several generalizations of the POMDP to multiagent settings have been proposed. Here we focus on the decentralized POMDP (Dec-POMDP) model for multiagent planning under uncertainty [Bernstein et al., 2002, Goldman and Zilberstein, 2004]. Solving a Dec-POMDP amounts to finding a set of optimal policies for the agents that maximize the expected shared reward. However, solving a Dec-POMDP has proven to be hard (NEXP-complete): The number of possible deterministic policies for a single agent grows doubly exponentially with the planning horizon, and exponentially with the number of actions and observations available. As a result, the focus has shifted to approximate solution techniques [Nair et al., 2003, Emery-Montemerlo et al., 2005, Oliehoek and Vlassis, 2007].

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Correspondence to Frans A. Oliehoek .

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Oliehoek, F.A., Kooij, J.F.P., Vlassis, N. (2008). A Cross-Entropy Approach to Solving Dec-POMDPs. In: Badica, C., Paprzycki, M. (eds) Advances in Intelligent and Distributed Computing. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 78. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74930-1_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74930-1_15

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-74929-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-74930-1

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