EE266: Stochastic Control

Sanjay Lall, Stanford University, Spring Quarter 2016.

Course description

Introduction to stochastic control, with applications taken from a variety of areas including supply-chain optimization, advertising, finance, dynamic resource allocation, caching, and traditional automatic control. Markov decision processes, optimal policy with full state information for finite-horizon case, infinite-horizon discounted, and average stage cost problems. Bellman value function, value iteration, and policy iteration. Approximate dynamic programming. Linear quadratic stochastic control.

Prerequisites: Linear algebra (as in EE263) and probability (as in EE178 or MS&E220).

Instructor

The materials for this course were written by Professors Stephen Boyd, Sanjay Lall, and Benjamin Van Roy at Stanford.

This year the course is taught by Professor Sanjay Lall

Schedule

  • Lectures Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:00 - 10:20am in 200-034

  • Review Sessions Fridays, 3:00 - 4:00pm in Hewlett 102

Announcements

  • EE266 is the same as MS&E251, Stochastic Decision Models.

  • EE266 was numbered EE365 in previous years. We'll use most of last year's notes, but add some new sections too.

Final Exam

  • The final exam will be a 24hr take-home. It will be available for pickup at:

    • Friday Jun 3, 5pm

    • Monday Jun 6, 10am or 5pm

    • Tuesday Jun 7, 10am or 5pm

    • Wednesday Jun 8, 10am