Planning for Package Deliveries in Risky Environments Over Multiple Epochs

10/19/2021
by   Blake Wilson, et al.
0

We study a risk-aware robot planning problem where a dispatcher must construct a package delivery plan that maximizes the expected reward for a robot delivering packages across multiple epochs. Each package has an associated reward for delivery and a risk of failure. If the robot fails while delivering a package, no future packages can be delivered and the cost of replacing the robot is incurred. The package delivery plan takes place over the course of either a finite or an infinite number of epochs, denoted as the finite horizon problem and infinite horizon problem, respectively. The dispatcher has to weigh the risk and reward of delivering packages during any given epoch against the potential loss of any future epoch's reward. By using the ratio between a package's reward and its risk of failure, we prove an optimal, greedy solution to both the infinite and finite horizon problems. The finite horizon problem can be solved optimally in O(K nlog n) time where K is the number of epochs and n is the number of packages. We show an isomorphism between the infinite horizon problem and Markov Decision Processes to prove an optimal O(n) time algorithm for the infinite horizon problem.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
07/23/2020

Batch Policy Learning in Average Reward Markov Decision Processes

We consider the batch (off-line) policy learning problem in the infinite...
research
01/31/2022

Learning Infinite-Horizon Average-Reward Markov Decision Processes with Constraints

We study regret minimization for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov ...
research
05/11/2018

Stochastic Approximation for Risk-aware Markov Decision Processes

In this paper, we develop a stochastic approximation type algorithm to s...
research
02/14/2012

Efficient Inference in Markov Control Problems

Markov control algorithms that perform smooth, non-greedy updates of the...
research
09/13/2018

PPtaxi: Non-stop Package Delivery via Multi-hop Ridesharing

City-wide package delivery becomes popular due to the dramatic rise of o...
research
08/16/2023

Eliciting Risk Aversion with Inverse Reinforcement Learning via Interactive Questioning

This paper proposes a novel framework for identifying an agent's risk av...
research
02/03/2018

Path Planning for Minimizing the Expected Cost till Success

Consider a general path planning problem of a robot on a graph with edge...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset