Maintenance optimization for heterogeneous infrastructure systems: Evolutionary algorithms for bottom-up methods

This chapter presents a methodology for maintenance optimization for heterogeneous infrastructure systems, i.e., systems composed of multiple facilities with different characteristics such as environments, materials and deterioration processes. We present a two-stage bottom-up approach. In the first step, optimal and near-optimal maintenance policies for each facility are found and used as inputs for the system-level optimization. In the second step, the problem is formulated as a constrained combinatorial optimization problem, where the best combination of facility-level optimal and near-optimal solutions is identified. An Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) is adopted to solve the combinatorial optimization problem. Its performance is evaluated using a hypothetical system of pavement sections. We find that a near-optimal solution (within less than 0.1% difference from the optimal solution) can be obtained in most cases. Numerical experiments show the potential of the proposed algorithm to solve the maintenance optimization problem for realistic heterogeneous systems.