Activation delay and aborting policy minimizing expected losses in consecutive attempts having cumulative effect on mission success

This paper proposes a new mission system model where the task may be attempted multiple times by different components that are activated one by one with dissimilar delays. The mission success depends on the cumulative effect of components that have completed the task operation. Each component may abort the task operation according to an individual shock-driven aborting policy defined by the number of experienced shocks and a threshold of operation time during the attempt. Dependent on the status of the cumulative effect, a common abort command (CAC) may also be issued to terminate all the ongoing operations to reduce the expected number of lost components. The optimal activation delay and aborting policy (ADAP) problem is formulated and solved, which determines the individual component aborting parameters, the CAC issuing parameter, and the component activation delays to minimize the expected mission losses (EML). A detailed case study of unmanned aerial vehicles executing a target destruction mission is provided to demonstrate the proposed model and investigate the effects of several key parameters on the mission performance and optimization solutions. The effectiveness of shock-driven and CAC-driven aborts in reducing the EML is also studied and compared using the case study.