Optimal mission abort policy with multiple abort criteria for a balanced system with multi-state components

Abstract In some engineering fields, systems are required to complete a mission over a period. However, for some safety-critical systems, the survival of systems often has higher priority than the successful achievement of the mission. In these cases, a mission needs to be aborted when a certain criterion is met, and a rescue procedure would be carried out to avoid system failure. Nowadays, reliability problems on balanced systems have attracted more and more attention because they often perform critical missions in industrial fields such as military weapons and new energy storage. In reported studies, no mission abort policy has been considered for balanced systems with multi-state components. To fill this gap, a novel mission abort policy is designed with multiple abort criteria to adapt to the characteristics of such systems. Two competing abort criteria are considered, including the maximum component state distance and the number of damaged components which are defined as components working in states no better than a predetermined state. Two optimization models are constructed to determine the optimum mission abort thresholds. Finally, numerical examples based on UAVs performing a surveillance mission are presented to illustrate the proposed mission abort policy.