Rapid assessment of system-of-systems(SoS) mission reliability based on Markov chains

Traditional reliability analysis methods can't perform well when applied to evaluating system-of-systems (SoS) reliability due to SoS's complexity of constituent systems and evolvability of its architecture. On the basis of analyzing the relationship between SoS capabilities and mission reliability, this work proposed a Markov chains model which can analyze SoS mission reliability quickly. We divide SoS states into three levels according to its capability level to complete assigned tasks, and SoS reliability under different tasks can be evaluated and analyzed by the corresponding state space transition expression. SoS reliability states are directly determined by its capabilities, and SoS capabilities are provided by groups of systems. So analyzing SoS reliability states should start from analyzing the states of constituent systems. A simplified case demonstrates how to apply the proposed method to evaluate the SoS mission reliability under continuous tasks.