A POMDP Framework to Find Optimal Inspection and Maintenance Policies via Availability and Profit Maximization for Manufacturing Systems

Maintenance can be the factor of either increasing or decreasing system’s availability, so it is valuable work to evaluate a maintenance policy from cost and availability point of view, simultaneously and according to decision maker’s priorities. This study proposes a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) framework for a partially observable and stochastically deteriorating system in which inspection and maintenance optimal policies of Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) must be determined to maximize the average profit and availability of the system simultaneously. A recent exact method named Accelerated Vector Pruning method (AVP) and some other popular estimating and exact methods are applied and compared in solving such problems.