State-based mission abort policies for multistate systems

Abstract

Most of the previous research on optimal mission abort policies was devoted to binary systems that can be only in two states, i.e., operable or failure. However, a wide class of engineering systems is characterized by more than one operable state. Thus, it can be reasonable to terminate a mission and initiate a rescue procedure that can save, e.g., costly or safety-critical systems when a system had deteriorated to a certain extent. A system operates in a random environment modeled by a renewal process of shocks. With each shock, the state of a system can deteriorate with certain probabilities that can eventually result in the total failure. The bivariate constrained probability-wise and cost-wise optimization problems are formulated and the necessary relationships for solving them are derived. The detailed illustrative numerical example is discussed.