A survey of the common-information approach to decentralized stochastic control
Abstract:
Decentralized stochastic control arises in multi-stage decision-making with multiple decisionmakers having different information and a common objective. Examples include cyber-physical systems, communication networks,sensing and surveillance systems,transportation systems,etc. In this paper we present a survey of the common-information approach to decentralized stochastic control. The key idea behind this approach is to formulate an equivalent centralized stochastic control problem from the point of view of a fictitious coordinator that observes only the information that is commonly available to
all decision-makers. We describe this approach for a general model and illustrate it by examples from real-time communication, queueing theory, and networked control systems.