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<article-title>On Opportunistic Techniques for Solving Decentralized Markov Decision Processes <br/>with Temporal Constraints</article-title></title-group>

<author><a href="mailto:marecki@usc.edu"><name>Janusz Marecki</name></a></author>
<aff>Computer Science Department University of Southern California <br/>941 W 37th Place, Los Angeles, CA 90089</aff>

<author><a href="mailto:tambe@usc.edu"><name>Milind Tambe</name></a></author>
<aff>Computer Science Department University of Southern California <br/>941 W 37th Place, Los Angeles, CA 90089</aff>
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<title>ABSTRACT</title>
<p>Decentralized Markov Decision Processes (DEC-MDPs) are a popular
model of agent-coordination problems in domains with uncertainty
and time constraints but very difficult to solve. In this
paper, we improve a state-of-the-art heuristic solution method for
DEC-MDPs, called OC-DEC-MDP, that has recently been shown
to scale up to larger DEC-MDPs. Our heuristic solution method,
called Value Function Propagation (VFP), combines two orthogonal
improvements of OC-DEC-MDP. First, it speeds up OC-DECMDP
by an order of magnitude by maintaining and manipulating
a value function for each state (as a function of time) rather than a
separate value for each pair of sate and time interval. Furthermore,
it achieves better solution qualities than OC-DEC-MDP because,
as our analytical results show, it does not overestimate the expected
total reward like OC-DEC- MDP. We test both improvements independently
in a crisis-management domain as well as for other
types of domains. Our experimental results demonstrate a significant
speedup of VFP over OC-DEC-MDP as well as higher solution
qualities in a variety of situations.</p>
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