On Piecewise Affine Reachability with Bellman Operators

We study the following reachability problem for piecewise affine maps: Given two vectors $\mathbf{s}, \mathbf{t} \in \mathbb{Q}^d$ and a piecewise affine map $f \colon \mathbb{Q}^d\rightarrow \mathbb{Q}^d$, does there exist $n\in \mathbb{N}$ such that $f^{n}(\mathbf{s}) = \mathbf{t}$? In this work, we focus on this reachability problem for a subclass of piecewise affine maps – Bellman operators arising from Markov decision processes. We prove that the reachability problem for $\max$- and $\min$-Bellman operators is decidable in any dimension under either of the following conditions: (i) the target vector $\mathbf{t}$ is not the fixed point of the operator $f$; or (ii) the initial and target vectors $\mathbf{s}$ and $\mathbf{t}$ are comparable with respect to the componentwise order. Furthermore, we show that in the two-dimensional case, the reachability problem for Bellman operators is decidable for arbitrary $\mathbf{s}, \mathbf{t} \in \mathbb{Q}^2$. This stands in sharp contrast to the known undecidability of reachability for general piecewise affine maps in dimension $d = 2$.

💡 Research Summary

This paper investigates the reachability problem for a special class of piecewise‑affine maps that arise as Bellman operators in Markov decision processes (MDPs). Given rational vectors s and t in