Decision Support in Intelligent Maintenance-planning Systems Based on Contextual Multi-armed Bandit Algorithm

In this paper we focus on two essential problems of maintenance decision support systems, namely, 1) detection of potential dangerous situation, and 2) classification of this situation in order to recommend an appropriate repair action. The former task is usually solved with the known statistical process control techniques. The latter problem can be reduced to the contextual multi- armed bandit problem. We propose a novel algorithm with Bayesian classification of abnormal situation and the softmax rule to explore the decision space. The dangerous situations are detected with the Shewhart control charts for the distances between the current and the normal situations. It is experimentally shown, that our algorithm is more accurate than the known contextual multi-armed methods with stochastic search strategies.