A New Condition for the Existence of Optimal Stationary Policies in Denumerable State Average Cost Continuous Time Markov Decision Processes with Unbounded Cost and Transition Rates

Abstract: This paper presents a new condition for the existence of optimal stationary policies in average-cost continuous-time Markov decision processes with unbounded cost and transition rates, arising from controlled queueing systems. This condition is closely related to the stability of queueing systems. It suggests that the proof of the stability can be exploited to verify the existence of an optimal stationary policy. This new condition is easier to verify than existing conditions. Moreover, several conditions are provided which suffice for the average-cost optimality equality to hold.