Evaluating Point-Based POMDP Solvers on Multicore Machines

Recent scaling up of partially observable Markov decision process solvers toward realistic applications is largely due to point-based methods which quickly provide approximate solutions for midsized problems. New multicore machines offer an opportunity to scale up to larger domains. These machines support parallel execution and can speed up existing algorithms considerably. In this paper, we evaluate several ways in which point-based algorithms can be adapted to parallel computing. We overview the challenges and opportunities and present experimental results, providing evidence to the usability of our suggestions.