Optimal adaptive control policy for joint machine maintenance and product quality control

This paper studies the joint machine maintenance and product quality control problem of a finite horizon discrete time Markovian deteriorating, state unobservable batch production system. Unlike previous studies, both the timing of the sampling action and the sample size are directly included in the action space of our dynamic programming model of the system. We formulate the system as a partially observable Markov decision process and derive some properties of the optimal value function which enable us to efficiently search the optimal maintenance and quality control policy to minimize the unexpected total discounted system cost.