Abstract Dynamic Programming
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It aims at a unified and economical development of the core theory and algorithms of total cost sequential decision problems, based on the strong connections of the subject with fixed point theory. The analysis focuses on the abstract mapping that underlies dynamic programming and defines the mathematical character of the associated problem. The discussion centers on two fundamental properties that this mapping may have: monotonicity and (weighted sup-norm) contraction. It turns out that the nature of the analytical and algorithmic DP theory is determined primarily by the presence or absence of these two properties, and the rest of the problem's structure is largely inconsequential. New research is focused on two areas: 1) The ramifications of these properties in the context of algorithms for approximate dynamic programming, and 2) The new class of semicontractive models, exemplified by stochastic shortest path problems, where some but not all policies are contractive.
The 2nd edition aims primarily to amplify the presentation of the semicontractive models of Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 of the first (2013) edition, and to supplement it with a broad spectrum of research results that I obtained and published in journals and reports since the first edition was written (see below). As a result, the size of this material more than doubled, and the size of the book increased by nearly 40%.
The book is an excellent supplement to several of our books: Dynamic Programming and Optimal Control (Athena Scientific, 2017), and Neuro-Dynamic Programming (Athena Scientific, 1996).
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Dimitri P. Bertsekas undergraduate studies were in engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. He obtained his MS in electrical engineering at the George Washington University, Wash. DC in 1969, and his Ph.D. in system science in 1971 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr. Bertsekas has held faculty positions with the Engineering-Economic Systems Dept., Stanford University (1971-1974) and the Electrical Engineering Dept. of the University of Illinois, Urbana (1974-1979). From 1979 to 2019 he was with the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), where he served as McAfee Professor of Engineering. In 2019, he was appointed Fulton Professor of Computational Decision Making, and a full time faculty member at the department of Computer, Information, and Decision Systems Engineering at Arizona State University (ASU), Tempe, while maintaining a research position at MIT. His research spans several fields, including optimization, control, large-scale computation, and data communication networks, and is closely tied to his teaching and book authoring activities. He has written numerous research papers, and eighteen books and research monographs, several of which are used as textbooks in MIT and ASU classes. Most recently Dr Bertsekas has been focusing on reinforcement learning, and authored a textbook in 2019, and a research monograph on its distributed and multiagent implementation aspects in 2020.
Professor Bertsekas was awarded the INFORMS 1997 Prize for Research Excellence in the Interface Between Operations Research and Computer Science for his book "Neuro-Dynamic Programming", the 2000 Greek National Award for Operations Research, the 2001 ACC John R. Ragazzini Education Award, the 2009 INFORMS Expository Writing Award, the 2014 ACC Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award for "contributions to the foundations of deterministic and stochastic optimization-based methods in systems and control," the 2014 Khachiyan Prize for Life-Time Accomplishments in Optimization, the SIAM/MOS 2015 George B. Dantzig Prize, and the 2022 IEEE Control Systems Award. In 2018, he was awarded, jointly with his coauthor John Tsitsiklis, the INFORMS John von Neumann Theory Prize, for the contributions of the research monographs "Parallel and Distributed Computation" and "Neuro-Dynamic Programming". In 2001, he was elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering for "pioneering contributions to fundamental research, practice and education of optimization/control theory, and especially its application to data communication networks."
Dr. Bertsekas' recent books are "Introduction to Probability: 2nd Edition" (2008), "Convex Optimization Theory" (2009), "Dynamic Programming and Optimal Control," Vol. I, (2017), and Vol. II: (2012), "Abstract Dynamic Programming" (2018), "Convex Optimization Algorithms" (2015), "Reinforcement Learning and Optimal Control" (2019), and "Rollout, Policy Iteration, and Distributed Reinforcement Learning" (2020), all published by Athena Scientific.
