Integrating Deterministic Planning and Reinforcement Learning for Complex Sequential Decision Making

This thesis presents a novel approach to solving decision-making problems in discrete, stochasticdomains. The method for solving these problems is often dictated by the availability of informationabout how the environment responds to actions taken by the agent. When the agentis given a model of the environment, it can plan out its actions beforehand, whereas an agentwithout a model must learn to differentiate good and bad decisions through direct experience.Until now, little attention has been paid to situations in which a model is only available for apart of the environment. We propose an algorithm which combines automated planning withhierarchical reinforcement learning in order to take advantage of the model when it is availableand sample from the environment when it is not. We prove that the same guarantees of optimalitythat apply to hierarchical reinforcement learning also apply to to this approach. Usingexperiments performed in two different domains, we demonstrate that hierarchically integratedplanning and reinforcement learning outperforms pure RL and pure planning hierarchies andthat this approach can scale to larger problems than are reasonably computable by other approaches.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Sciences (Engineering)

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

EECS - Computer and Information Sciences

Grantor dc:publisher

Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies

Year dc:date

2013

Author dc:creator

• Ernsberger, Timothy S.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Ray, Soumya

• Artificial Intelligence
• reinforcement learning
• automated planning
• Markov decision process

Statement dc:rights

• unrestricted
• This thesis or dissertation is protected by copyright: some rights reserved. It is licensed for use under a Creative Commons license. Specific terms and permissions are available from this document's record in the OhioLINK ETD Center.

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1354813154

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:etd.ohiolink.edu:case1354813154