An α-vector predictive value iteration algorithm for transportation infrastructure maintenance under partially observable conditions

Chunhui Guo and Zhenglin Liang

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2025, vol. 264, issue PA

Abstract: Transportation infrastructure is degrading over time and poses the risk of failure when exposed to a dynamic environment. Periodic inspection is often implemented to assess the requirement of maintenance. However, the inspected conditions can only partially reflect the underlying degradation, complicating the decision of maintenance. Moreover, inspections of early degradation often have no value-adding to condition improvement and incur a portion of unnecessary expenses. To address the abovementioned issues, we propose a sequential predictive maintenance policy that accounts for the partial observation of the infrastructure’s condition to reduce unnecessary inspections. The schedule of inspection timings is predicted according to the estimated Remaining Useful Life distribution, adaptive to stochastic degradation. We demonstrate that the optimal value function is piecewise linear and convex when decision epochs are non-periodic. Leveraging this insight, we have designed an α-vector Predictive Value Iteration algorithm (α-PVI) to optimize the transportation infrastructure maintenance policy. The α-PVI algorithm further reduces the time complexity compared with the Point-Based Value Iteration algorithm. Our designed approach is verified through an application for the maintenance optimization of pavements and bridges. The results demonstrate that the α-PVI algorithm reduces unnecessary inspection costs by on average 61.25% when compared to the periodic inspection approach. The α-PVI algorithm constructs a new paradigm of predictive maintenance under partially observable conditions.

Keywords: Predictive maintenance; Partially observable Markov decision process; Inspection; Iterative algorithms; Transportation infrastructure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0951832025004363
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:264:y:2025:i:pa:s0951832025004363

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2025.111235

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 ().