An approximate dynamic programming approach for the maintenance optimisation of networked critical infrastructures

The continuous performance of networked infrastructures, such as transportation, telecommunications, and power transmission, is critical to the economic development and social well-being of society. To ensure their reliability in continuously meeting prescribed demand, cost-effective maintenance is essential. To this end, the influence of maintenance actions measures on the reliability of an infrastructure need to be considered both during their implementation and after their completion. To address this problem and to consider the uncertainty of future states, we model the multi-period optimisation of an infrastructure’s maintenance planning as a stochastic dynamic programming problem. An approximate dynamic programming approach is developed to deal with the computational complexity and solve the described problem. The proposed approach can help deal with the uncertainty of future infrastructure states by determining the optimal maintenance plan for each possible state in advance.