Dynamic programming and influence diagrams

A hstruct -The concept of a super value node is developed to estend the theor? of influence diagrams to allow dynamic programming to be performed within this graphical modeling framework. The operations necessa? to exploit the presence of these nodes and efficiently analyze the models are developed. The key result is that by reprewnting value function separability in the structure of the graph of the influence diagram. formulation is simplified and operations on the model can take advantage of the wparability. Froni the decision analysis perspective. this allows simple exploitation of separabilih in the value function of a decision problem which can significantly reduce memory and computation requirements. Importantly. this allows algorithms to be designed to solve influence diagrams that automatically recognize the opportunih for applying dynamic programming. From the decision processes perspective, influence diagrams with super value nodes allow efficient formulation and solution of nonstandard decision process structures. They a h allow the exploitation of conditional independence between state variables. Examples are provided that demonstrate these advantages.