A Risk-Centered Mission Reliability Model Managing System Health Deterioration and Environmental Shock Effects

Various mission-driven systems inevitably confront with the coupled risk of health degradation and stochastic environmental shocks during mission execution. To balance system survivability and mission accomplishment, mission aborts can be implemented to prevent catastrophic failure consequences. This work proposes an innovative risk-centered mission abort policy, formulated as an optimization model based on a Markov decision process (MDP) with a limited horizon. This study aims to reduce the anticipated overall cost linked to mission failures and system malfunctions. We characterizes the value function's structure and leverage these insights to demonstrate that the optimal policy adheres to a stable control-limit framework. Numerical experiments demonstrate the model's superior performance in risk control.