A Group Maintenance Method of Drone Swarm Considering System Mission Reliability

Abstract

Based on the characteristics of drone swarm such as low cost, strong integrity, and frequent information exchange, as well as the high cost of timely maintenance of traditional units. This paper proposes a swarm maintenance method based on the reliability assessment of multi-layer complex network missions, which combines the multi-layer complex network system evaluation method with the group maintenance method. On the basis of considering the problem of maintenance grouping cost, the failure mechanism of drones in different modes and the impact of drone maintenance on the system are studied. According to the failure model of single node, the complex network method is used to establish the swarm system’s topology model and evaluate the system mission reliability. The maintenance grouping strategy is optimized by using the multi-objective planning of cost and system mission reliability. Compared with the existing just in time maintenance methods, this method can greatly reduce the total maintenance cost of the swarm system maintenance under the condition of ensuring the high mission robustness of the swarm. In addition, a universal drone swarm mission scenario is used to illustrate the method, and the results verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the method.