Mission reliability modeling of UAV swarm and its structure optimization based on importance measure

The mission reliability of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm is the capability of the swarm to complete its intended missions under specified operating conditions for a specified period of time. In order to achieve high mission reliability, the optimal structure of UAV swarm needs to be determined when some UAVs fail during the mission. In this paper, the mission reliability and structure optimization of UAV swarm are studied based on importance measure. Firstly, the mission reliability model of the UAV swarm based on polygonal linear consecutive-k-out-of-n: F systems is proposed. Secondly, based on the importance measures, the performance of the UAV swarm given different reliability of a UAV at different locations is analyzed. Thirdly, with the three indicators, namely conditional reliability, conditional failure rate, remaining useful life, the structure optimization of UAV swarm during the mission process is analyzed. Numerical examples of triangular and quadrilateral UAV swarms are given to demonstrate the proposed method. The proposed model and metric can be used to support mission planning and the design of a UAV swarm.