SEMI-MARKOV DECISION PROCESSES WITH POLYNOMIAL REWARD.

A semi-Markov decision process, with a denumerable multidimensional state space, is considered. At any given state only a finite number of actions can be taken to control the process. The immediate reward earned in one transition period is merely assumed to be bounded by a polynomial and a bound is imposed on a weighted moment of the next state reached in one transition. It is shown that under an ergodicity assumption there is a stationary optimal policy for the long-run average reward criterion. A queueing network scheduling problem, for which previous criteria are inapplicable, is given as an application.