Distributed chance-constrained model predictive control for condition-based maintenance planning for railway infrastructures

Abstract

We develop a Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach for condition-based maintenance planning under uncertainty for railway infrastructure systems composed of multiple components. Piecewise-affine models with uncertain parameters are used to capture both the nonlinearity and uncertainties in the deterioration process. To keep a balance between robustness and optimality, we formulate the MPC optimization problem as a chance-constrained problem, which ensures that the constraints, e.g., bounds on the degradation level, are satisfied with a given probabilistic guarantee. Two distributed algorithms, one based on Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition and the other derived from a constraint-tightening technique, are proposed to improve the scalability of the MPC approach. Computational experiments show that the distributed method based on Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition performs the best in terms of computational time and convergence to global optimality. By comparing the chance-constrained MPC approaches with deterministic approach, and traditional time-based maintenance approach, we show that despite their high computational requirements, chance-constrained MPC approaches are cost-efficient and robust in the presence of uncertainties.