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

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.