Optimal mission aborting in multistate systems with storage

Abstract

Though intensive research efforts have been devoted to the study of mission aborting rules (MARs) for diverse types of systems, no previous work has discussed this problem for systems with product storage. This paper contributes by modeling and optimizing MARs for multistate systems with product storage, which may accumulate surplus product when the system performance surpasses the required demand and compensate product deficiency otherwise. The storage has limited capacity, uploading performance, and downloading performance. The system state may deteriorate due to random shocks, which have different severity and inter-arrival time distributions during primary mission (PM) and rescue procedure (RP). We put forward a numerical algorithm to evaluate the mission success probability (MSP) and damage avoidance probability (DAP) of the considered system with specified PM and RP demands and durations. Based on the MSP and DAP evaluation, we make a further contribution by formulating and solving a constrained optimization problem that finds the optimal MAR maximizing the MSP while meeting a desired level of DAP. Using a power system example, we also investigate influences of storage capacity, storage uploading/downloading performance constraints, and desired DAP level on the system performance metrics and on the MAR optimization solutions.