This book presents the first part of a planned two-volume series devoted to a systematic exposition of some recent developments in the theory of discrete-time Markov control processes (MCPs). Interest is mainly confined to MCPs with Borel state and control (or action) spaces, and possibly unbounded costs and noncompact control constraint sets. MCPs are a class of stochastic control problems, also known as Markov decision processes, controlled Markov processes, or stochastic dynamic pro- grams; sometimes, particularly when the state space is a countable set, they are also called Markov...

Devoted to a systematic exposition of some recent developments in the theory of discrete-time Markov control processes, the text is mainly confined to MCPs with Borel state and control spaces. Although the book follows on from the author's earlier work, an important feature of this volume is that it is self-contained and can thus be read independently of the first.
The control model studied is sufficiently general to include virtually all the usual discrete-time stochastic control models that appear in applications to engineering, economics, mathematical population processes, operations...

This book presents the first part of a planned two-volume series devoted to a systematic exposition of some recent developments in the theory of discrete-time Markov control processes (MCPs). Interest is mainly confined to MCPs with Borel state and control (or action) spaces, and possibly unbounded costs and noncompact control constraint sets. MCPs are a class of stochastic control problems, also known as Markov decision processes, controlled Markov processes, or stochastic dynamic pro- grams; sometimes, particularly when the state space is a countable set, they are also called Markov...

This book is about discrete-time, time-homogeneous, Markov chains (Mes) and their ergodic behavior. To this end, most of the material is in fact about stable Mes, by which we mean Mes that admit an invariant probability measure. To state this more precisely and give an overview of the questions we shall be dealing with, we will first introduce some notation and terminology. Let (X, B) be a measurable space, and consider a X-valued Markov chain . = { k' k = 0, 1, ... } with transition probability function (t.pJ.) P(x, B), i.e., P(x, B): = Prob ( k+1 E B I k = x) for each x E X, B E B, and k =...

This book offers the reader a snapshot of the state-of-the-art in the growing and mutually enriching areas of semidefinite optimization, conic optimization and polynomial optimization. It covers theory, algorithms, software and applications.