Over the last 50 years a steady stream of accounts have been written on the
separation principle of stochastic control. Even in the context of the
linear-quadratic regulator in continuous time with Gaussian white noise, subtle
difficulties arise, unexpected by many, that are often overlooked. In this
paper we propose a new framework for establishing the separation principle.
This approach takes the viewpoint that stochastic systems are well-defined maps
between sample paths rather than stochastic processes per se and allows us to
extend the separation principle to systems driven by martingales with possible
jumps. While the approach is more in line with "real-life" engineering thinking
where signals travel around the feedback loop, it is unconventional from a
probabilistic point of view in that control laws for which the feedback
equations are satisfied almost surely, and not deterministically for every
sample path, are excluded.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figures, 2nd revision: added references, correction
