A restless bandit approach for capacitated condition based maintenance scheduling

Ece Zeliha Demirci (), Joachim Arts and Geert-Jan Van Houtum ()
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Ece Zeliha Demirci: TED University, Turkey
Geert-Jan Van Houtum: Eindhoven University of Technology, NL

DEM Discussion Paper Series from Department of Economics at the University of Luxembourg

Abstract: This paper considers the problem of optimally maintaining multiple non-identical machines deteriorating over time. The number of maintenance activities that can be carried out simultaneously is restricted by the number of maintenance workers. The main goal is to propose a heuristic with low complexity that consistently produces solutions close to the optimal strategy for problems of real size. We cast the problem as a restless bandit problem and propose an index based heuristic (Whittle's index policy) which can be computed efficiently. Another goal is to empirically compare the performance of the index heuristic with alternative policies. In addition to achieving superior performance over failure-based and threshold policies, Whittle's policy converges to the optimal solution when the number of machines is moderately high and/or maintenance workload is high.

Keywords: Maintenance; Restless bandit; Whittle's index heuristic. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 C63 M11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:luc:wpaper:22-01

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