Evolutionary Policy Iteration Under a Sampling Regime for Stochastic Combinatorial Optimization
Lauren A. Hannah, Warren B. Powell · IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control · 2010
This article modifies the evolutionary policy selection algorithm of Chang et al., which was designed for use in infinite horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a large action space to a discrete stochastic optimization problem, in an algorithm called Evolutionary Policy Iteration-Monte Carlo (EPI-MC). EPI-MC allows EPI to be used in a stochastic combinatorial optimization setting with a finite action space and a noisy cost (value) function by introducing a sampling schedule. Convergence of EPI-MC to the optimal action is proven and experimental results are given.