quote:Original post by Roaders
By MDPs and POMDPs do you mean Markov decision process and partially observable Markov decision process.

Yes (I actually did associate the abbreviations with the names in my post!)

quote:Original post by Roaders
Am I correct in understanding that these are other approaches to the same sort of problem? - route planning?

Route planning is just a specific type of planning task. Planning in general can be thought of as solving a particular MDP or POMDP, depending on the (type of) information available.

There are many different approaches to solving planning problems. They can be broadly categorised by the sorts of plans they seek to find:

• policies (universal plans)


• route/path planning (serial plans/single path through the state space)


• reactive plans

...and then you have replanning systems, which seek to update/alter the present plan or policy given new information.

If you''re interesting more references for solving MDPs and POMDPs I can post a few bibliography entries for the key papers from the AI perspective.

Cheers,

Timkin