Mission Abort Policy Considering Imperfect Alarms and Two Abort Options

ABSTRACT A mission may be aborted during operation to increase the likelihood of system survival when an alarm system indicates that the system has entered a defect state. However, due to measurement and environmental noise, missed and false alarms frequently occur during online condition monitoring, complicating the decision‐making process for mission abort. Additionally, once a mission is aborted, various rescue procedures can be initiated. This study addresses these challenges by proposing a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) framework aimed at minimizing the expected total cost associated with mission and system failures. Within this framework, the probability that the system is in a defect state is dynamically updated using real‐time signals from the alarm system. We demonstrate that the optimal mission abort policy follows a control limit policy, where a mission should be aborted when the defect probability exceeds a certain threshold during each period. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed policy, we present a case study on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).