Controlling a random population

Speaker(s)

Pierre Ohlmann

Affiliation

IRIF, Université de Paris

Date

March 10, 2021, 2:15 p.m.

Information about the event

online

Seminar

Seminar Automata Theory

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Bertrand et al. introduced a model of parameterised systems, where each agent is represented by a finite state system, and studied the following control problem: for any number of agents, does there exist a controller able to bring all agents to a target state? They showed that the problem is decidable and EXPTIME-complete in the adversarial setting, and posed as an open problem the stochastic setting, where the agent is represented by a Markov decision process. In this paper, we show that the stochastic control problem is decidable. Our solution makes significant uses of well quasi orders, of the max-flow min-cut theorem, and of the theory of regular cost functions. We introduce an intermediate problem of independent interest called the sequential flow problem, and study the complexity of solving it.

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