Mean Payoff Optimization for Systems of Periodic Service and Maintenance

Mean Payoff Optimization for Systems of Periodic Service and Maintenance

David Klaška, Antonín Kučera, Vít Musil, Vojtěch Řehák

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 5386-5393. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/598

Consider oriented graph nodes requiring periodic visits by a service agent. The agent moves among the nodes and receives a payoff for each completed service task, depending on the time elapsed since the previous visit to a node. We consider the problem of finding a suitable schedule for the agent to maximize its long-run average payoff per time unit. We show that the problem of constructing an epsilon-optimal schedule is PSPACE-hard for every fixed non-negative epsilon, and that there exists an optimal periodic schedule of exponential length. We propose randomized finite-memory (RFM) schedules as a compact description of the agent's strategies and design an efficient algorithm for constructing RFM schedules. Furthermore, we construct deterministic periodic schedules by sampling from RFM schedules.
Keywords:
Planning and Scheduling: PS: Robot planning
Planning and Scheduling: PS: Routing
Robotics: ROB: Motion and path planning