Hierarchical modeling of systems with similar components: A framework for adaptive monitoring and control

• A computational framework is proposed for adaptive monitoring and control.
• It adopts a scheme based on Markov Chain Monte Carlo for inference and learning.
• Hierarchical Bayesian modeling is used to allow a system-level flow of information.
• Results show potential of significant savings in management of wind farms.

System management includes the selection of maintenance actions depending on the available observations: when a system is made up by components known to be similar, data collected on one is also relevant for the management of others. This is typically the case of wind farms, which are made up by similar turbines. Optimal management of wind farms is an important task due to high cost of turbines׳ operation and maintenance: in this context, we recently proposed a method for planning and learning at system-level, called PLUS, built upon the Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) framework, which treats transition and emission probabilities as random variables, and is therefore suitable for including model uncertainty. PLUS models the components as independent or identical. In this paper, we extend that formulation, allowing for a weaker similarity among components. The proposed approach, called Multiple Uncertain POMDP (MU-POMDP), models the components as POMDPs, and assumes the corresponding parameters as dependent random variables. Through this framework, we can calibrate specific degradation and emission models for each component while, at the same time, process observations at system-level. We compare the performance of the proposed MU-POMDP with PLUS, and discuss its potential and computational complexity.