Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Multi-Year Asset Management Under Budget Constraints

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Fard, Amir, Yuan, Arnold X. -X.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Fard, Amir
Yuan, Arnold X. -X.
author_facet Fard, Amir
Yuan, Arnold X. -X.
contents Budget planning and maintenance optimization are crucial for infrastructure asset management, ensuring cost-effectiveness and sustainability. However, the complexity arising from combinatorial action spaces, diverse asset deterioration, stringent budget constraints, and environmental uncertainty significantly limits existing methods' scalability. This paper proposes a Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning methodology specifically tailored to multi-year infrastructure planning. Our approach decomposes the problem into two hierarchical levels: a high-level Budget Planner allocating annual budgets within explicit feasibility bounds, and a low-level Maintenance Planner prioritizing assets within the allocated budget. By structurally separating macro-budget decisions from asset-level prioritization and integrating linear programming projection within a hierarchical Soft Actor-Critic framework, the method efficiently addresses exponential growth in the action space and ensures rigorous budget compliance. A case study evaluating sewer networks of varying sizes (10, 15, and 20 sewersheds) illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Compared to conventional Deep Q-Learning and enhanced genetic algorithms, our methodology converges more rapidly, scales effectively, and consistently delivers near-optimal solutions even as network size grows.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_19458
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Multi-Year Asset Management Under Budget Constraints
Fard, Amir
Yuan, Arnold X. -X.
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
Optimization and Control
Budget planning and maintenance optimization are crucial for infrastructure asset management, ensuring cost-effectiveness and sustainability. However, the complexity arising from combinatorial action spaces, diverse asset deterioration, stringent budget constraints, and environmental uncertainty significantly limits existing methods' scalability. This paper proposes a Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning methodology specifically tailored to multi-year infrastructure planning. Our approach decomposes the problem into two hierarchical levels: a high-level Budget Planner allocating annual budgets within explicit feasibility bounds, and a low-level Maintenance Planner prioritizing assets within the allocated budget. By structurally separating macro-budget decisions from asset-level prioritization and integrating linear programming projection within a hierarchical Soft Actor-Critic framework, the method efficiently addresses exponential growth in the action space and ensures rigorous budget compliance. A case study evaluating sewer networks of varying sizes (10, 15, and 20 sewersheds) illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Compared to conventional Deep Q-Learning and enhanced genetic algorithms, our methodology converges more rapidly, scales effectively, and consistently delivers near-optimal solutions even as network size grows.
title Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Multi-Year Asset Management Under Budget Constraints
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19458