Articles
Publication Date: 2025
IEEE Transactions on Reliability (15581721)74(4)pp. 4704-4718
Survival of real-world critical systems, such as satellites, airplanes, and submarines, is crucial because their failures can result in irreparable economic losses and harm to the systems. An effective measure to improve the survivability of a system and reduce the probability of failure is the implementation of a mission abort policy. If the risk of system failure reaches a certain threshold, the mission can be aborted and a rescue or recovery operation should be initiated. In this article, we study a coherent system with independent, heterogeneous components under the mission abort policy and utilize the concept of survival signatures to assess the system’s survivability. We develop the corresponding probabilistic model and investigate the tradeoff between a mission’s probability of success and the expected number of lost components. Through several comprehensive illustrated examples, we compare various types of abort rules. Our results show that the mission abort rule should be based on the number of failed components and the critical time at which the mission can be aborted to achieve the lowest operational losses. © 1963-2012 IEEE.
Publication Date: 2025
Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part O: Journal of Risk and Reliability (17480078)
For critical systems, such as satellites and aircraft, survivability can be extremely important as failures can result in irreversible economic loss and even casualties. A mission abort policy and the subsequent rescue procedure are effective tools for increasing the survivability of systems performing missions of fixed or variable duration. However, it comes at a price of decreasing the mission success probability. Therefore, a reasonable trade-off should be achieved. This problem has been studied in numerous publications, however, we are the first to discuss general multi-component coherent systems. Moreover, the new methodology based on signatures describing coherent systems is employed for description and defining a criterion of abort. Several optimization problems are formulated and discussed. The detailed numerical examples illustrate our findings and justify the developed innovative approach. © IMechE 2025.
