Optimal mission abort policy for a multi-component system with failure interaction

Abstract

This paper investigates the optimal joint inspection and mission abort policies for a multi-component system with failure interaction. Proportional hazards model (PHM) is employed to characterize the effect of one component's deterioration on other components’ hazard rates. The deterioration level can be only detected via inspections and then the predictive reliability is updated based on the degradation and age information. To enhance the system survivability, the mission will be aborted and the rescue procedure will be initiated immediately if the predictive reliability is lower than the abort threshold. The inspection period and the abort threshold jointly form a two-dimensional policy. The explicit expressions for mission success probability and system survivability are formulated. The optimal policy is investigated to minimize the expected total cost including inspection, mission failure and system failure cost. Some structural properties of the optimal policy are obtained theoretically. Finally, numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the model.