A Mission Reliability Optimization Model for Safety-Critical Equipment Considering both Internal Degradation and External Shocks

Safety-critical equipment such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), submarines, fleets, and military aircraft must perform a variety of missions where mission reliability and equipment survivability are paramount. To enhance survivability, mission can be aborted upon encountering certain failure conditions. In this study, a novel mission abort policy is devised that allows for risk control of both internal degradation and external shocks. The cumulative impact of shocks on system degradation is quantified via a generic stochastic model. Inspections are executed equidistantly to reveal the underlying degradation damage, following which adaptive abort decisions are made using a control limit policy. By jointly optimizing the inspection interval and abort threshold, the long-term operational cost of the system is minimized. Numerical experiments exemplify the model effectiveness in mission risk control and loss mitigation.