Strategic life cycle decision-making for the management of complex Systems subject to uncertain environmental policy

Time series semi-Markov decision process with variable costs for maintenance planning

“…Nguyen et al (2014) employed the MDP methodology for maintenance decision making focusing on the effect of technological advancements on the type of decision taken. The model described by Niese & Singer (2013) somewhat resembles the approach proposed here, however, the authors admit that their decision matrix is only marginally useful to the user, partly due to large size; whereas application of a similar method to the problem described in Section 3 of this paper yielded a decision matrix capable of providing useful information to the user, which is perhaps due to the nature of the problem.…”

Ship design evaluation subject to carbon emission policymaking using a Markov decision process framework

“…Decisions are valued using cumulative discounted sums of expected rewards. In sum, the use of a MDP represents a natural extension to design evaluation and allows for greater control of initial condition (Niese and Singer, 2013).…”

“…A¼{a} is a finite set of actions the system manager can perform. T(s 0 |s,a) is the transition probability that the system transitions to state s 0 after executing action a in state s. R(s,a) is the real-valued reward received when executing action a in state s (Niese and Singer, 2013).…”

“…The authors acknowledge that other state considerations are plausible, such as equipment's degree of deterioration. In fact, the MDP framework has previously been applied in Niese and Singer (2013) to demonstrate how system deterioration can impact life cycle decision-making. However, a limited number of influencing factors are included in the presented case study.…”

Application of systems engineering to structuring acquisition decisions for marine emission reduction technologies

“…Performance values for alternative technologies are subject to both epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty as i) there is little historical data to rely on and ii) conditions outside the control of decision‐makers may change over a contract or vessel lifecycle which might also impact the long‐term outcome of the decisions made . This uncertainty permeates all decision problems listed above, and should be explicitly accounted for.…”