Risk Control of Mission-Critical Systems: Abort Decision-Makings Integrating Health and Age Conditions

The mission abort is an effective action to reduce the risk of casualties and enhance the survivability of mission-oriented systems, such as aircrafts, submarines, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). A key target of operators in real mission environment is to strive for balance between the success possibility of a mission and system survivability (SS), via elaborate mission abort plans. In this article, we design mission abort policies based on two crucial information: 1) degradation degree of monitored health features, and 2) system age. Accordingly, the operators may abort the mission if the degradation attains a preset control limit at early system ages, or continue the task otherwise. We carry out loss analysis to determine the optimal abort action, by linking MSP and SS. Structural insights regarding the optimality of degradation control limit as well as age threshold are explored. For a comparative purpose, the performances of some heuristic abort policies are analytically evaluated. We make contribution by scheduling mission abort plans harnessing both condition monitoring and age information, which promotes the timeliness and robustness of risk control. A case study on inertial navigation systems of UAV executing line inspection missions is used to illustrate the applicability and superiority of the proposed abort policies.