Failure risk management: adaptive performance control and mission abort decisions

Abstract

The failure behavior of safety‐critical systems typically depends on the system performance level, which offers opportunities to control system failure risk through dynamic performance adjustment. Moreover, mission abort serves as an intuitive way to mitigate safety hazards during mission execution. Our study focuses on systems that execute successive missions with random durations. To balance mission completion probability and system failure risk, we examine two decision problems: when to abort missions and how to select the performance level prior to mission abort. Our objective is to maximize the expected revenue through dynamic performance control and mission abort (PCMA) decisions. We consider condition‐based PCMA decisions and formulate the joint optimization problem into a Markov decision process. We establish the monotonicity and concavity of the value function. Based on this insight, we show that optimizing the mission abort policy requires a series of control limits. In addition, we provide conditions under which the performance control policies are monotone. For comparative purposes, we analytically evaluate the performances of some heuristic policies. Finally, we present a case study involving unmanned aerial vehicles executing power line inspections. The results indicate the superiority of our proposed risk control policies in enhancing operational performance for safety‐critical systems. Dynamic performance adjustment and mission abort decisions provide opportunities to reduce the failure risk and increase operational rewards of safety‐critical systems.