A weakness of classical Markov decision processes (MDPs) is that they scale very poorly due to the flat state-space representation.
Factored MDPs address this representational problem by exploiting problem structure to specify the transition and reward functions
of an MDP in a compact manner. However, in general, solutions to factored MDPs do not retain the structure and compactness
of the problem representation, forcing approximate solutions, with approximate linear programming (ALP) emerging as a promising
MDP-approximation technique. To date, most ALP work has focused on the primal-LP formulation, while the dual LP, which forms
the basis for solving constrained Markov problems, has received much less attention. We show that a straightforward linear
approximation of the dual optimization variables is problematic, because some of the required computations cannot be carried
out efficiently. Nonetheless, we develop a composite approach that symmetrically approximates the primal and dual optimization
variables (effectively approximating both the objective function and the feasible region of the LP), leading to a formulation
that is computationally feasible and suitable for solving constrained MDPs. We empirically show that this new ALP formulation
also performs well on unconstrained problems.
Keywords Markov decision processes - approximate linear programming - primal-LP formulation - dual LP - constrained Markov problems
Mathematics Subject Classifications (2000) 60J22 - 90C90 - 62C99