A multistate network approach for reliability evaluation of unmanned swarms by considering information exchange capacity

摘要

An unmanned swarm is a group of numerous unmanned ground or aerial vehicles performing tasks in a self-organized and self-adaptive manner to achieve an overall mission objective. Efficient and reliable information exchange among the agents is essential for the unmanned swarm to accomplish the mission. Thus, it is important to provide an accurate reliability model and a corresponding efficient method of evaluation for the unmanned swarm information exchange network (USIEN). In this paper, we develop a multistate network model for the reliability evaluation of USIEN that considers the capacity for information exchange. We propose an overall reliability metric to evaluate the reliability of USIEN under certain missions. In addition, an improved fast statespace decomposition (SSD) bounding algorithm with a reliability threshold for approximating the proposed reliability metric is developed. Results and comparisons with extant studies show that the proposed model and metric lead to a more realistic method to evaluate the reliability of USIEN. Efficiency investigations indicate that the proposed algorithm provides an efficient approximation of reliability for the large unmanned swarm. The proposed model and metric can be used to support mission planning and the design of an unmanned swarm.

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