What makes long‐term monitoring convenient? A parametric analysis of value of information in infrastructure maintenance

Abstract

Summary Information collected by monitoring systems can provide a significant economic benefit to the operation and maintenance of infrastructure components only under specific conditions. The information has to be precise, not redundant, related to relevant decision problems under uncertainty as, for example, the appropriate scheduling of maintenance actions, and the decision maker needs to be able to process that information and react timely. All these considerations can be naturally embedded in the value of information (VoI), a utility‐based metric for assessing the impact of the additional information in decision making under uncertainty. In this paper, we investigate the relation between the VoI and key features of the monitoring system, of the component deterioration and of the decision‐making process, including measure accuracy and availability, deterioration rates, damage predictability, reaction time, maintenance costs, and the economic discount factor. By leveraging previous work, we model the maintenance process as a partially observable Markov decision process, and we compute the VoI of long‐term monitoring. Our proposed framework allows for a detailed quantitative analysis on the joint effects of these features and can be useful to identify conditions when the benefit of monitoring is high, to assign priorities among components that deserve to be instrumented or to optimize the allocation of resources to monitoring efforts.

Joint optimization of monitoring quality and replacement decisions in condition-based maintenance

“…In [1], the authors presented an effective approach to solve MDP/POMDP problems for optimal sequential decision making in complex, large scale, non sta tionary, partially or fully observable stochastic engineering environ ments. For recent studies, the relation between the value of information and numerous key features of the monitoring system was investigated in [16]. In [18], the authors proposed a methodology for an integral risk based optimization of inspections in structural systems.…”

Development of a Low-Cost System for the Accurate Measurement of Structural Vibrations

“…Civil structures and infrastructures could be considered as the main foundation of today's modern society and, hence, their soundness is of utmost importance. However, the reports of ASCE infrastructure grades shows that in the United States: (1) 9.1% of all the bridges are not structurally efficient, (2) 188 million trips are taken every day over these deficient bridges, (3) The average age of bridges is 43 years old [1]. Monitoring and evaluating the health state of these structures are required for the maintenance applications, for minimizing the reparation costs and, eventually, for guaranteeing infrastructure safety [2][3][4].…”

“…However, the reports of ASCE infrastructure grades shows that in the United States: (1) 9.1% of all the bridges are not structurally efficient, (2) 188 million trips are taken every day over these deficient bridges, (3) The average age of bridges is 43 years old [1]. Monitoring and evaluating the health state of these structures are required for the maintenance applications, for minimizing the reparation costs and, eventually, for guaranteeing infrastructure safety [2][3][4]. Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) applications provide information on the state of structures, their functioning, and their structural response.…”

Optimization of an aperiodic sequential inspection and condition-based maintenance policy driven by value of information

“…In this paper, it is proposed to make use of the concept of Value of Information (VoI) to quantify such improvements and help plan information collection in a rational manner. This concept was developed in the field of statistical decision theory, in the seminal works of [22,23,24], and has received increasing attention recently in the context of structural health monitoring [25,26,27,28,29,30], risk-based inspection [31,32,33] and maintenance planning [34,35,36,37,38].…”