Scalable Solution Methods for Dec-POMDPs with Deterministic Dynamics

Abstract Many high-level multi-agent planning problems, such as multi-robot navigation and path planning, can be modeled with deterministic actions and observations. In this work, we focus on such domains and introduce the class of Deterministic Decentralized POMDPs (Det-Dec-POMDPs)—a subclass of Dec-POMDPs with deterministic transitions and observations given the state and joint actions. We then propose a practical solver, Iterative Deterministic POMDP Planning (IDPP), based on the classic Joint Equilibrium Search for Policies framework, specifically optimized to handle large-scale Det-Dec-POMDPs that existing Dec-POMDP solvers cannot handle efficiently.