Fast Value Iteration for Goal-Directed Markov Decision Processes
  Planning problems where effects of actions are non-deterministic can be
modeled as Markov decision processes. Planning problems are usually
goal-directed. This paper proposes several techniques for exploiting the
goal-directedness to accelerate value iteration, a standard algorithm for
solving Markov decision processes. Empirical studies have shown that the
techniques can bring about significant speedups.
