Policy iteration for the deterministic control problems - a viscosity approach

Wenpin Tang, Hung Vinh Tran, Yuming Paul Zhang

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the convergence rate of policy iteration for (deterministic) optimal control problems in continuous time. To overcome the problem of ill-posedness due to lack of regularity, we consider a semi-discrete scheme by adding a viscosity term via finite differences in space. We prove that PI for the semi-discrete scheme converges exponentially fast, and provide a bound on the error induced by the semi-discrete scheme. We also consider the discrete space-time scheme, where both space and time are discretized. Convergence rate of PI and the discretization error are studied.