The Relations Among Potentials, Perturbation Analysis, and Markov Decision Processes

This paper provides an introductory discussion for an important concept, the performance potentials of Markov processes, and its relations with perturbation analysis (PA), average-cost Markov decision processes (MDP), Poisson equations, α-potentials, the fundamental matrix, and the group inverse of the transition matrix (or the infinitesimal generators). Applications to single sample path-based performance sensitivity estimation and performance optimization are also discussed. On-line algorithms for performance sensitivity estimates and on-line schemes for policy iteration methods are presented. The approach is closely related to reinforcement learning algorithms.