Dynamic Teams and Decentralized Control Problems with Substitutable Actions

TL;DR

This paper introduces the substitutability assumption, enabling simple solutions for complex dynamic team and decentralized control problems that are not part of traditional classes, by exploiting action effects and state structures.

Contribution

It demonstrates that substitutability allows for optimal linear strategies and recursive solutions in non-partially-nested LQG problems, simplifying complex control scenarios.

Findings

Linear strategies are optimal under certain conditions.

State structure can be exploited for recursive control solutions.

Substitutability acts as a key to problem simplification.

Abstract

This paper considers two problems -- a dynamic team problem and a decentralized control problem. The problems we consider do not belong to the known classes of "simpler" dynamic team/decentralized control problems such as partially nested or quadratically invariant problems. However, we show that our problems admit simple solutions under an assumption referred to as the substitutability assumption. Intuitively, substitutability in a team (resp. decentralized control) problem means that the effects of one team member's (resp. controller's) action on the cost function and the information (resp. state dynamics) can be achieved by an action of another member (resp. controller). For the non-partially-nested LQG dynamic team problem, it is shown that under certain conditions linear strategies are optimal. For the non-partially-nested decentralized LQG control problem, the state structure can be exploited to obtain optimal control strategies with recursively update-able sufficient statistics. These results suggest that substitutability can work as a counterpart of the information structure requirements that enable simplification of dynamic teams and decentralized control problems.