MARKOV DECISION PROCESSES
Models, Methods, Directions, and Open Problems

About the volume

The book will be published in Y2K by Kluwer in series of volumes on operations research. The series is edited by Frederick Hillier. Each author will receive a free copy of the volume.

The goal of this book is to put together surveys and articles describing the state and the future of the field written by top experts on the subject. We hope to cover most of the areas of MDP's theory and applications. These articles will describe the main models, the main results, the state of the art, future research directions, and open problems. We believe that this volume will contribute towards making our field more visible, and encourage new research and new researchers.

The tentative table of contents is based on positive responses we have received from experts with whom we have discussed this volume.

We (the editors) are going to write a short introduction to the volume, with key definitions and notation. This introduction will be written after we collect the papers. However, we are planning to put down the notation, and send it electronically to the contributors shortly. We hope that the authors follow the notation as closely as possible. We see two reasons for doing so: (i) to make the volume more accessible to readers, (ii) to save productive space in papers. As you know, it takes time and space to introduce MDP settings and we'd like to minimize the combined effort. The authors will then introduce additional notation and definitions as required in their specific settings.

The papers should be submitted electronically in LaTex, and we shall provide authors with macros and notation within two weeks. Before submitting the volume we intend to incorporate some formatting macroes. We expect the average size of each paper (in its final, book form) to be about 20-25 pages.

DEADLINE FOR PAPER SUBMISSION:
September 1, 1999

We hope to circulate the papers between contributors were appropriate, and obtain final versions by the end of 1999, do some formatting, write an introduction, and submit the volume to the publisher as soon as we can. Note that if space constraints arise, we may decide to move all references to a single list, at the end of the volume.

Effective February 15, 1999, we are going to support two identical web sites:

Technion site, Israel: www.ee.technion.ac.il/~adam/MDP

US site, SUNYSB: www.ams.sunysb.edu/~feinberg/MDP

with information for contributors, macros and notation.

We shall appreciate earlier submissions, comments and suggestions. Thank you very much for your interest in this project.

Eugene Feinberg and Adam Shwartz

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This page was last updated on March 7, 1999.