UAV Swarm Availability Analysis Based on Binary-State Systems and Multi-State Systems

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is rapidly increasing. Certain tasks necessitate the deployment of multiple UAVs for a unified mission, forming what is known as a UAV swarm. A critical factor in assessing a UAV or UAV swarm is reliability. Various mathematical models are employed to analyze reliability. For instance, Binary-State Systems (BSS) models evaluate two states: operational/functional and faulty. Some research advocates for the use of a Multi-State System (MSS) model. MSS enables the examination of more than just two states (operational and faulty), providing a more comprehensive analysis. This paper presents a comparative study on calculating the availability of a UAV swarm using both BSS and MSS models. Different UAV swarm topologies are interpreted as typical MSS structures (series, parallel, k-out-of-n) and represented by structure function. The analysis includes both homogeneous and heterogeneous UAV swarms, which can be either non-redundant or redundant hot stable systems.