Optimal stopping for the predictive maintenance of a structure subject to corrosion

TL;DR

This paper introduces a numerical method to determine the optimal maintenance timing for corrosion-affected structures by modeling the problem as an optimal stopping problem for a stochastic hybrid process.

Contribution

It presents a novel numerical approach to solve the optimal stopping problem for complex stochastic hybrid systems in maintenance scheduling.

Findings

Effective computation of optimal maintenance time

Application to corrosion-affected metallic structures

Balancing early and late maintenance costs

Abstract

We present a numerical method to compute the optimal maintenance time for a complex dynamic system applied to an example of maintenance of a metallic structure subject to corrosion. An arbitrarily early intervention may be uselessly costly, but a late one may lead to a partial/complete failure of the system, which has to be avoided. One must therefore find a balance between these too simple maintenance policies. To achieve this aim, we model the system by a stochastic hybrid process. The maintenance problem thus corresponds to an optimal stopping problem. We propose a numerical method to solve the optimal stopping problem and optimize the maintenance time for this kind of processes.