We present our study of solving large unit commitment problems in the California ISO planning model. The model calculates hourly day-ahead unit commitments, and all instances need to be solved close to optimality within an hour. It takes CPLEX, the current state-of-the-art solver, up to 5 and 10 hours to solve the deterministic instances and the 5-scenario stochastic instances, respectively. The 20-scenario instances are practically unsolvable as no feasible solutions are found after 24 hours.We consider improving solution times through distributed-memory parallelization. Prior techniques such as distributed branch- and-bound perform poorly for our problems. We propose coordinated concurrent search to solve the deterministic instances on a cluster. For stochastic instances, we propose parallelization strategy that combines scenario-based decomposition and asynchronous solves guided by intermediate results from progressive hedging. Our decomposition creates linear sub problems instead of quadratic ones that are oftentimes intractable. On a cluster of 16 IBM Power7 machines, our parallel implementation achieves on average 12.7 and 22 times speedup for the deterministic instances and the 5-scenario stochastic instances, respectively. All problems are solved within an hour to near optimality including the previously unsolvable 20-scenario stochastic instances.

We introduce the Bayes-Adaptive Interactive Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (BA-IPOMDP), the first multiagent decision model that explicitly incorporates model learning. As in I-POMDPs, the BA-IPOMDP agent maintains beliefs over interactive states, which include the physical states as well as the other agents’ models. The BA-IPOMDP assumes that the state transition and observation probabilities are unknown, and augments the interactive states to include these parameters. Beliefs are maintained over this augmented interactive state space. This (necessary) state expansion exacerbates the curse of dimensionality, especially since each I-POMDP belief update is already a recursive procedure (because an agent invokes belief updates from other agents’ perspectives as part of its own belief update, in order to anticipate other agents’ actions). We extend the interactive particle filter to perform approximate belief update on BA-IPOMDPs. We present our findings on the multiagent Tiger problem.

We examine the suitability of using decision processes to model real-world systems of intelligent adversaries. Decision processes have long been used to study cooperative multiagent interactions, but their practical applicability to adversarial problems has received minimal study. We address the pros and cons of applying sequential decision-making in this area, using the crime of money laundering as a specific example. Motivated by case studies, we abstract out a model of the money laundering process, using the framework of interactive partially observable Markov decision processes (I-POMDPs). We address why this framework is well suited for modeling adversarial interactions. Particle filtering and value iteration are used to solve the model, with the application of different pruning and look-ahead strategies to assess the tradeoffs between solution quality and algorithmic run time. Our results show that there is a large gap in the level of realism that can currently be achieved by such decision models, largely due to computational demands that limit the size of problems that can be solved. While these results represent solutions to a simplified model of money laundering, they illustrate nonetheless the kinds of agent interactions that cannot be captured by standard approaches such as anomaly detection. This implies that I-POMDP methods may be valuable in the future, when algorithmic capabilities have further evolved.