Probabilistic MDP-behavior planning for cars

This paper presents a method for high-level decision making in traffic environments. In contrast to the usual approach of modeling decision policies by hand, a Markov Decision Process (MDP) is employed to plan the optimal policy by assessing the outcomes of actions. Using probability theory, decisions are deduced automatically from the knowledge about how road users behave over time. This approach does neither depend on an explicit situation recognition nor is it limited to only a variety of situations or types of descriptions. Hence it is versatile and powerful. The contribution of this paper is a mathematical framework to derive abstract symbolic states from complex continuous temporal models encoded as Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBN). For this purpose discrete MDP states are interpreted by random variables. To make computation feasible this space grows adaptively during planning and according to the problem to be solved.