The standard Value Iteration (VI) algorithm, referred to as Value Iteration Pre-Jacobi (PJ-VI) algorithm, is the simplest Value Iteration scheme, and the well-known algorithm for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In the literature, several versions of VI algorithm were developed in order to reduce the number of iterations: the VI Jacobi (VI-J) algorithm, the Value Iteration Pre-Gauss-Seidel (VI-PGS) algorithm and the VI Gauss-Seidel (VI-GS) algorithm. In this article, the authors combine the advantages of VI Pre Gauss-Seidel algorithm, the decomposition technique and the parallelism in order to propose a new Parallel Hierarchical VI Pre-Gauss-Seidel algorithm. Experimental results show that their approach performs better than the traditional VI schemes in the case where the global problem can be decomposed into smaller problems.
Value iteration algorithm for mean-field games
