Mission Abort Policy in Heterogeneous Nonrepairable 1-Out-of-N Warm Standby Systems

Many real-world critical systems, such as aircraft and human space flight systems, utilize mission aborts to enhance the survivability of the system. Specifically, the mission objectives of these systems can be aborted in cases where a certain malfunction condition is met, and a rescue or recovery procedure is then initiated for system survival. Traditional system reliability models typically cannot address the effects of mission aborts, and thus are not applicable to analyzing systems subject to mission abort requirements. In this paper, we first develop a numerical methodology to model and evaluate mission success probability and system survivability of 1-out-of-N warm standby systems subject to constant or adaptive mission abort policies. The system components are heterogeneous, characterized by different performances and different types of time-to-failure distributions. Based on the proposed evaluation method, we make another new contribution by formulating and solving the optimal mission abort problem, as well as a combined optimization problem that identifies the mission abort policy and component activation sequence maximizing mission success probability while achieving the desired level of system survivability. Efficiencies of constant and adaptive mission abort policies are compared through examples. Examples also demonstrate the tradeoff between system survivability and mission success probability due to the utilization of a mission abort policy. Such a tradeoff analysis can help identify optimal decisions on system mission abort and standby policies, promoting safe and reliable operation of warm standby systems.