POMDPPlanners: Open-Source Package for POMDP Planning
Authors: Yaacov Pariente, Vadim Indelman
Organizations: Faculty of Mathematics, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 3200003, Israel · Stephen B. Klein Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 3200003, Israel
We present POMDPPlanners, an open-source Python package for empirical evaluation of Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) planning algorithms. The package integrates state-of-the-art planning algorithms, a suite of benchmark environments with safety-critical variants, automated hyperparameter optimization via Optuna, persistent caching with failure recovery, and configurable parallel simulation -- reducing the overhead of extensive simulation studies. POMDPPlanners is designed to enable scalable, reproducible research on decision-making under uncertainty, with particular emphasis on risk-sensitive settings where standard toolkits fall short.
Figures & tables
Package
Language
Cont.
Modern Planners
Hyp. opt.
Safety Envs.
Parallel
Caching
AI-Toolbox
C++
–
–
–
–
–
–
MADP
C++
–
–
–
–
–
–
POMDPs.jl
Julia
✓
✓ †
–
–
✓
–
pomdpy
Python
–
–
–
–
–
–
pomdp_py
Python
–
–
–
–
–
–
POMDPPlanners
Python
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
✓
Table 1: Comparison of POMDP planning frameworks. ✓ = supported; – = not supported. All frameworks support discrete spaces; Cont. = continuous spaces; Hyp. opt. = automated hyperparameter optimization; Safety Envs. = safety-critical environments with violation metrics; Modern Planners = includes planners beyond POMCP appearing in post-2018 POMDP literature (e.g., POMCPOW, PFT-DPW, BetaZero). † POMDPs.jl provides a solver interface; planners are separate community packages.
Figure 1: Architecture of POMDPPlanners . Workflows feed into a shared Task Manager with persistent caching. Dashed arrows indicate data flow between abstractions; outputs are logged via MLflow.
Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder · Kevin T. Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering, Virginia Tech
Faculty of Mathematics Technion – Israel Institute of Technology Haifa, Israel · Stephen B. Klein Faculty of Aerospace Engineering; Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences Technion – Israel Institute of Technology Haifa, Israel