Memory-Bounded Dynamic Programming (MBDP) has proved extremely effective in
solving decentralized POMDPs with large horizons. We generalize the algorithm
and improve its scalability by reducing the complexity with respect to the
number of observations from exponential to polynomial. We derive error bounds
on solution quality with respect to this new approximation and analyze the
convergence behavior. To evaluate the effectiveness of the improvements, we
introduce a new, larger benchmark problem. Experimental results show that
despite the high complexity of decentralized POMDPs, scalable solution
techniques such as MBDP perform surprisingly well.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Conference on Uncertainty
in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2007
