Multi-Year Maintenance Planning for Large-Scale Infrastructure Systems: A Novel Network Deep Q-Learning Approach

Abstract

Infrastructure asset management is essential for sustaining the performance of public infrastructure such as road networks, bridges, and utility networks. Traditional maintenance and rehabilitation planning methods often face scalability and computational challenges, particularly for large-scale networks with thousands of assets under budget constraints. This paper presents a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework that optimizes asset management strategies for large infrastructure networks. By decomposing the network-level Markov Decision Process (MDP) into individual asset-level MDPs while using a unified neural network architecture, the proposed framework reduces computational complexity, improves learning efficiency, and enhances scalability. The framework directly incorporates annual budget constraints through a budget allocation mechanism, ensuring maintenance plans are both optimal and cost-effective. Through a case study on a large-scale pavement network of 68,800 segments, the proposed DRL framework demonstrates significant improvements over traditional methods like Progressive Linear Programming and genetic algorithms, both in efficiency and network performance. This advancement contributes to infrastructure asset management and the broader application of reinforcement learning in complex, large-scale environments.