Value of information: impact of monitoring on decision-making

Abstract

SUMMARYStructural health monitoring (SHM) is a process aimed at providing accurate and in‐time information concerning structural health condition and performance, which can serve as an objective basis for decision‐making regarding operation, maintenance, and repair. However, at the current state of practice, SHM is less used on real structures, and one reason for this is the lack of understanding of the Value of Information obtained from SHM. Consequently, even when SHM is implemented, bridge managers often make decisions based on experience or common sense, frequently considering with reserve and sometimes disregarding the suggestions arising from SHM. Managers weigh the SHM results based on their prior perception of the state of the structure and the confidence that they have in the specific applied SHM system and then make decisions considering the perceived effects of the actions they can undertake. In order to address and overcome the aforementioned identified limitations in the use of the SHM, a rational framework for assessment of the impact of the SHM on decision‐making is researched and proposed in this paper. The framework is based on the concept of Value of Information and demonstrated on the case study of the Streicker Bridge, a new pedestrian bridge on Princeton University campus. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

On the Value of Monitoring Information for the Structural Integrity and Risk Management

“…Zonta et al. () present a methodology for economic evaluation of the impact of monitoring on bridge management using monitoring and VoI theory. Monitoring is here defined as any information about the structure obtained by for example, visual inspection, integrity consultants, and archive research.…”

Value of information in sequential decision making: Component inspection, permanent monitoring and system-level scheduling

“…Both Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) and POMDPs have been extensively investigated for IM applications [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13], due Contents lists available at ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ress to the computational efficiency of dynamic programming. A seminal introduction on VoI analysis is provided by the book of Raiffa and Schlaifer [14], while applications to management of structural and infrastructure systems is provided by Pozzi and Der Kiureghian [15], Straub [16], Zonta et al [17], and Malings and Pozzi [18]; most applications refer to a single-decision making problem, however assessment of the VoI in sequential decision making is also presented in [16,19,20]. While metrics for inspection scheduling applied to IM have been developed for general applications [19,21], we recently proposed a VoI-based approximate heuristic for system-level inspection scheduling for POMDPs [22].…”

The State-of-the-Art on Framework of Vibration-Based Structural Damage Identification for Decision Making

“…One reason is that damage detection is normally affected by modeling errors and environmental noise such that the damage features are not deterministically related to the actual state and thus decision makers will differently weigh the detection outcomes. Another reason is that managers are very concerned with the consequences of wrong action and thus will make decisions considering the possible effects of the action they can undertake [217]. Wong and Yao [218] realized the need to evaluate the benefit of SHM on the decision making of owners or managers.…”

“…Pozzi and Der Kiureghian [219] were the first to calculate the value of information (VOI) for SHM by simulating an observable linear degradation law. Zonta et al [217] introduced a rational framework to assess the impact of SHM on decision making, which address the effect of prior perception and quantify the economic impact of a wrong action.…”