TY - JOUR
AU1 - FONNESBECK, CHRISTOPHER J.
AB - ABSTRACT. An important technical component of natural resource management, particularly in an adaptive management context, is optimization. This is used to select the most appropriate management strategy, given a model of the system and all relevant available information. For dynamic resource systems, dynamic programming has been the de facto standard for deriving optimal state‐specific management strategies. Though effective for small‐dimension problems, dynamic programming is incapable of providing solutions to larger problems, even with modern microcomputing technology. Reinforcement learning is an alternative, related procedure for deriving optimal management strategies, based on stochastic approximation. It is an iterative process that improves estimates of the value of state‐specific actions based in interactions with a system, or model thereof. Applications of reinforcement learning in the field of artificial intelligence have illustrated its ability to yield near‐optimal strategies for very complex model systems, highlighting the potential utility of this method for ecological and natural resource management problems, which tend to be of high dimension. I describe the concept of reinforcement learning and its approach of estimating optimal strategies by temporal difference learning. I then illustrate the application of this method using a simple, well‐known case study of Anderson (1975), and compare the reinforcement learning results with those of dynamic programming. Though a globally‐optimal strategy is not discovered, it performs very well relative to the dynamic programming strategy, based on simulated cumulative objective return. I suggest that reinforcement learning be applied to relatively complex problems where an approximate solution to a realistic model is preferable to an exact answer to an oversimplified model.
TI - SOLVING DYNAMIC WILDLIFE RESOURCE OPTIMIZATION PROBLEMS USING REINFORCEMENT LEARNING
JF - Natural Resource Modeling
DO - 10.1111/j.1939-7445.2005.tb00147.x
DA - 2005-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/wiley/solving-dynamic-wildlife-resource-optimization-problems-using-NZpi0FGr0h
SP - 1
VL - 18
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -