An Offline Deep Reinforcement Learning for Maintenance Decision-Making
This addresses the need for more complete maintenance solutions for operators in industries like aviation, though it is incremental as it builds on existing reinforcement learning methods applied to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of maintenance decision-making by proposing an offline deep reinforcement learning framework that directly suggests actions like 'continuation of operation' or 'repair shop visitation' to maximize profit, instead of just estimating failure likelihood, and demonstrates it on the NASA C-MAPSS dataset.
Several machine learning and deep learning frameworks have been proposed to solve remaining useful life estimation and failure prediction problems in recent years. Having access to the remaining useful life estimation or likelihood of failure in near future helps operators to assess the operating conditions and, therefore, provides better opportunities for sound repair and maintenance decisions. However, many operators believe remaining useful life estimation and failure prediction solutions are incomplete answers to the maintenance challenge. They argue that knowing the likelihood of failure in the future is not enough to make maintenance decisions that minimize costs and keep the operators safe. In this paper, we present a maintenance framework based on offline supervised deep reinforcement learning that instead of providing information such as likelihood of failure, suggests actions such as "continuation of the operation" or "the visitation of the repair shop" to the operators in order to maximize the overall profit. Using offline reinforcement learning makes it possible to learn the optimum maintenance policy from historical data without relying on expensive simulators. We demonstrate the application of our solution in a case study using the NASA C-MAPSS dataset.