SOPS – A Tool to Find Optimal Policies in Stochastic Dynamic Systems

Abstract

The task of finding optimal policies in stochastic dynamic systems is challenging.The theory of stochastic dynamic programming (SDP) is quite complex and theavailable software packages are not intended for non-specialists. Furthermore, SDP istraditionally limited to quite small and well defined problems. Stochastic optimisationin policy space (SOPS) seems to be an attractive alternative, particularly for peoplewith a background in simulation of dynamic systems. However, to date no user friendlysoftware has been available for this method. In this paper we present and demonstratea new program package for this task. The resulting software allows the user toformulate the model in a well-known simulation program, Powersim Studio 2005. Themodel is automatically transferred to a standalone program. The SOPS program allowsthe user to reset model parameters, to specify search criteria, and to study the results ofrepeated searches for optimal policies.