Designing mission abort strategies based on early-warning information: Application to UAV

The mission abort is an effective action to reduce the risk of casualties and enhance the survivability of mission-based systems such as aircrafts, submarines, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). A main task in real operations is to strive for balance between the mission reliability and the system survivability via elaborate mission abort plans. In this paper, we design the optimal mission abort policies based on the information of early-warning signals, which indicates the possible forthcoming fatal malfunction. Depending on the acquisition time of such information, the operator may immediately abort the mission, or ignore the information and continue the task. Within the framework of a constant mission duration, we carry out an economic analysis for the above problem. The optimal abort decision that minimizes the expected total economic loss is investigated. We further extend the proposed model to the scenario of a random mission duration and derive the corresponding optimal abort decisions. A case study on a UAV executing power-grid inspection missions is used to illustrate the applicability of the abort policies.