Hierarchical framework for interpretable and specialized deep reinforcement learning-based predictive maintenance

Deep reinforcement learning holds significant potential for application in industrial decision-making, offering a promising alternative to traditional physical models. However, its black-box learning approach presents challenges for real-world and safety-critical systems, as it lacks interpretability and explanations for the derived actions. Moreover, a key research question in deep reinforcement learning is how to focus policy learning on critical decisions within sparse domains. This paper introduces a novel approach that combines probabilistic modeling and reinforcement learning, providing interpretability and addressing these challenges in the context of safety-critical predictive maintenance. The methodology is activated in specific situations identified through the input–output hidden Markov model, such as critical conditions or near-failure scenarios. To mitigate the challenges associated with deep reinforcement learning in safety-critical predictive maintenance, the approach is initialized with a baseline policy using behavioral cloning, requiring minimal interactions with the environment. The effectiveness of this framework is demonstrated through a case study on predictive maintenance for turbofan engines, outperforming previous approaches and baselines, while also providing the added benefit of interpretability. Importantly, while the framework is applied to a specific use case, this paper aims to present a general methodology that can be applied to diverse predictive maintenance applications.