A survey of Markov decision programming techniques applied to the animal replacement problem
系统讨论了用马尔可夫决策规划方法解决动物替换问题中均匀性、畜群约束和维度灾难等难题，并评估了优化技术，对农业经济学和运筹学研究者有参考价值。
The major difficulties of the animal replacement problem are identified as uniformity, herd restraints and the "curse of dimensionality". Approaches for circumventing these difficulties using Markov decision programming methods are systematically discussed, and possible optimisation techniques are described and evaluated. Assuming that the objective of the farmer is maximum net returns from the entire herd, relevant criteria of optimality are discussed. It is concluded that a Bayesian technique is a promising approach as concerns the uniformity problem, that parameter iteration may be used under herd restraints, and that hierarchic Markov processes have contributed to the solution of the dimensionality problem. Copyright 1994 by Oxford University Press.