An important question in the context of infrastructure management pertains to the Value of Information (VoI) of noisy data and uncertain measurements. Quantification of this value can, for instance, help us assess the impact of a structural health monitoring system over the life-cycle of a structure, or the amount of resources a decision-maker should be willing to spend in order to acquire information prior to a structural intervention.

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Accordingly, we can define VoI as a life-cycle or a step-wise metric. It can be shown that POMDPs inherently leverage the step-wise VoI to guide optimal decisions for scheduling of observational actions (e.g. inspection visits) at every decision step. Based on this result and the POMDP optimality properties, it can be also shown that the life-cycle VoI is always non-negative under a POMDP policy. This means that better and/or additional information or data can only improve the efficacy of the decision-maker's choices in the long-run, thus reducing the life-cycle cost of the implemented policy.

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Notwithstanding the intuitive nature of non-negativity of VoI, it is worth noting that this is not guaranteed for any locally optimal or otherwise suboptimal policy. Such policies are well-studied in engineering systems decision-making, including, among others, decision assumptions following condition-based, risk-based, and periodic inspection and maintenance schemes with thresholds and interval parameters that are accordingly tuned.

Hence, "better" or "more" information does possibly hurt under a non-POMDP policy, something that tells us that decisions about a highly accurate inspection technique or an expensive permanent monitoring scheme should not be made in isolation of the decision optimization algorithm that will be finally used to prescribe structural interventions. Below is a figure showing the VoI and Value of Structural Health Monitoring (VoSHM) for a deteriorating 3 component system.