A note on weak compactness of occupation measures for an absorbing Markov decision process

Abstract

We consider an absorbing Markov decision process with Borel state and action spaces. We study conditions under which the MDP is uniformly absorbing and the set of occupation measures of the MDP is compact in the usual weak topology. These include suitable continuity requirements on the transition kernel and conditions on the dynamics of the system at the boundary of the absorbing set. We generalize previously known results and give an answer to some conjectures that have been mentioned in the related literature.