Markov Decision Processes with Incomplete Information and Semi-Uniform Feller Transition Probabilities

Eugene A. Feinberg, Pavlo O. Kasyanov, Michael Z. Zgurovsky

Published 2021-08-20Version 1

This paper deals with control of partially observable discrete-time stochastic systems. It introduces and studies the class of Markov Decision Processes with Incomplete information and with semi-uniform Feller transition probabilities. The important feature of this class of models is that the classic reduction of such a model with incomplete observation to the completely observable Markov Decision Process with belief states preserves semi-uniform Feller continuity of transition probabilities. Under mild assumptions on cost functions, optimal policies exist, optimality equations hold, and value iterations converge to optimal values for this class of models. In particular, for Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes the results of this paper imply new and generalize several known sufficient conditions on transition and observation probabilities for the existence of optimal policies, validity of optimality equations, and convergence of value iterations.