Inspection, prediction and decision-making in infrastructure management: Framework, models and computation

Decision-making models provide highway agencies with a plan for optimal decisions about maintenance and repair activities. The objective of these models is to minimize the total expected cost of maintaining a system of facilities incurred by an agency and the users over a given planning horizon. Recent models take into account measurement error in the inspection process and optimize the inspection schedule. Other state-of-the-art models include uncertainty in performance forecasting. Our research develops a model that jointly determines when to inspect and what maintenance activity to perform, while taking into account both uncertainty in the measurements and feedback in the estimation of the deterioration rate. A computational implementation is performed in order to study empirically the relative significance of uncertainties in the deterioration rate and the state of the system.