Mission Abort Policy for Coherent Systems With Heterogeneous Components

Survival of real-world critical systems, such as satellites, airplanes, and submarines, is crucial because their failures can result in irreparable economic losses and harm to the systems. An effective measure to improve the survivability of a system and reduce the probability of failure is the implementation of a mission abort policy. If the risk of system failure reaches a certain threshold, the mission can be aborted and a rescue or recovery operation should be initiated. In this article, we study a coherent system with independent, heterogeneous components under the mission abort policy and utilize the concept of survival signatures to assess the system’s survivability. We develop the corresponding probabilistic model and investigate the tradeoff between a mission’s probability of success and the expected number of lost components. Through several comprehensive illustrated examples, we compare various types of abort rules. Our results show that the mission abort rule should be based on the number of failed components and the critical time at which the mission can be aborted to achieve the lowest operational losses.