Optimal mission abort policy for partially repairable heterogeneous systems

Abstract

To enhance survivability of many real-world critical systems (e.g., aircrafts, human space flight systems and dangerous technological processes), mission abort procedures are often utilized in practice. In such cases, in order to improve survivability, a rescue or recovery procedure is initiated. In this paper, we first develop a methodology for obtaining the mission success probability (MSP) and the system survival probability (SSP) for heterogeneous systems with major and minor failures. A major failure is non-repairable and results in a failure of a mission, whereas a minor failure is minimally repaired. We consider a policy where a mission is aborted and a rescue procedure is activated if the mth minimal repair occurs before time ξ since the start of a mission. We demonstrate the tradeoff between the SSP and the MSP that should be balanced by the proper choice of the decision variables m and ξ. A detailed illustrative example is presented. © 2018 Elsevier B.V.