Towards a bridge between cost and wealth in risk-aware planning

Abstract

Risk attitude reflects an intelligent agent's preference for different uncertain rewards. Cost is the resource consumed; wealth is the total amount of the resource an agent holds. In a risk-aware system whose risk attitude is not independent of wealth, utility is a function of wealth. Given the utility function is one-switch, if we simply use cost based utility functions for the reasoning, unless the initial wealth is zero, we cannot precisely obtain the optimum preference in every decision step. A bridge algorithm between cost and wealth helps us solve this problem. We provide a framework of the bridge algorithm for risk-aware Markov decision processes. We present an example of the block-world problem to explain the algorithm.An effective bridge algorithm helps planners to make reasonable decisions according to their risk attitudes, without changing the structure of Markov domains. A bridge between cost and wealth enables us to deal with planning domains using the powerful backward induction approach instead of decision tree. This will have profound theoretical and realistic influence on artificial intelligence, economics, health care, as well as other areas concerning risk.