Maintenance policy analysis of the regenerative air heater system using factored POMDPs

Kıvanç, İpek, Özgür-Ünlüakın, Demet and Bilgiç, Taner

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2022, vol. 219, issue C

Abstract: Maintenance optimization of multi-component systems is a difficult problem. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are powerful tools for such problems under uncertainty in stochastic environments. In this study, the main POMDP solution approaches and solvers are surveyed. Then, based on experimental models with different complexities in the size of the system space, selected POMDP solvers using different representation patterns for modeling and different procedures for updating the value function while solving are compared. Furthermore, to show that factored representations are advantageous in modeling and solving the maintenance problem of multi-component systems where there exist also stochastic dependencies among the components, the maintenance problem of the one-line regenerative air heater system available in thermal power plants is modeled and solved with factored POMDPs. In-depth sensitivity analyses are performed on the obtained policy. The results show that factored POMDPs enable compact modeling, efficient policy generation and practical policy analysis for the tackled problem. Furthermore, they also motivate the use of factored POMDPs in the generation and analysis of maintenance policies for similar multi-component systems.

Keywords: Partially observable Markov decision process; Factored structure; Maintenance; Multi-component system; Stochastic dependency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832021006773
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:219:y:2022:i:c:s0951832021006773

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2021.108195

Access Statistics for this article

Reliability Engineering and System Safety is currently edited by Carlos Guedes Soares

More articles in Reliability Engineering and System Safety from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().