Spatiotemporal Resilience of IoT-Enabled Unmanned System of Systems

As advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT) and unmanned technologies continues to progress, the development of unmanned system of systems (USS) has reached unprecedented levels. While prior research has predominantly examined temporal variations in USS resilience, spatial changes remain underexplored. However, USS may involve kinetic engagements and frequent spatial changes during mission execution, affecting signal interference in data layer communications. Although time-dependent factors primarily govern mission effectiveness of the USS, spatial factors influence the transmission stability of the data layer. Consequently, assessing spatiotemporal variations in USS performance is critical. To address these challenges, this study introduces a spatiotemporal resilience assessment framework, which evaluates USS resilience across both temporal and spatial dimensions. Furthermore, we propose a spatiotemporal resilience optimization scheme that enhances system adaptability throughout the mission lifecycle, with a particular emphasis on prevention and recovery strategies. Finally, we validate the validity of the proposed concepts and methods with a case study featuring a regular hexagonal deployment of USS. The results show that the spatiotemporal resilience can better reflect the spatial change characteristics of USS, and the proposed optimization strategy improves the prevention spatiotemporal resilience, recovery spatiotemporal resilience, and entire-process spatiotemporal resilience of USS by 0.22%, 8.39%, and 11.29%, respectively.