Average optimality for continuous-time Markov decision processes under weak continuity conditions

Abstract

This article considers the average optimality for a continuous-time Markov decision process with Borel state and action spaces and an arbitrarily unbounded nonnegative cost rate. The existence of a deterministic stationary optimal policy is proved under a different and general set of conditions as compared to the previous literature; the controlled process can be explosive, the transition rates can be arbitrarily unbounded and are weakly continuous, the multifunction defining the admissible action spaces can be neither compact-valued nor upper semi-continuous, and the cost rate is not necessarily inf-compact.