Percolation Markov Decision Processes

Abstract: We study Percolation Markov Decision Processes (PMDPs), in which the decision maker repeatedly moves a token through the d-dimensional integer lattice with deterministic transitions and random payoffs assigned to the edges. Payoffs are revealed before the beginning of the decision process and the decision maker aims to maximize the average accumulated payoff over a fixed horizon. We establish the existence of the uniform value (as the horizon tends to infinity) and 0-optimal strategies. In the particular case of Bernoulli payoffs, we establish continuity results for the uniform value. We also present several one-dimensional examples to illustrate that optimal strategies may be very complex. Then, we introduce a dimensional lifting property that allows PMDPs to be approximated by PMDPs of lower dimension and could be used to approximate critical probability thresholds in percolation theory.