Equilibrium control policies for Markov chains

Abstract

The average cost criterion has held great intuitive appeal and has attracted considerable attention. It is widely employed when controlling dynamic systems that evolve stochastically over time by means of formulating an optimization problem to achieve long-term goals efficiently. The average cost criterion is especially appealing when the decision-making process is long compared to other timescales involved, and there is no compelling motivation to select short-term optimization. This paper addresses the problem of controlling a Markov chain so as to minimize the average cost per unit time. Our approach treats the problem as a dual constrained optimization problem. We derive conditions guaranteeing that a saddle point exists for the new dual problem and we show that this saddle point is an equilibrium control policy for each state of the Markov chain. For practical situations with constraints consistent to those we study here, our results imply that recognition of such saddle points may be of value in deriving in real time an optimal control policy.