Mathematical modelling of mission-abort policies: a review

Abstract

Abstract This paper reviews works that consider the mathematical modelling of mission-abort policies (MAPs). In a MAP, a valuable, and perhaps, vulnerable system performs a mission with two, sometimes conflicting objectives, mission success and system survival; and the purpose of modelling is to determine the conditions under which a mission should be aborted. Such problems are important in defence and are emerging in transportation and health management. We classify models by the nature of the mission and the system, the nature of the return or rescue, type of deterioration model and the decision objectives. We show that the majority of works consider a model of a one system, one target mission in which the mission is aborted once the hazard of failure reaches a critical level, and the operating environment is the same for the outbound and inbound parts of the mission. Typically, the hazard of failure depends on the number of shocks received so far. Our analysis indicates that there has been little modelling development for multiple systems that can multi-task and for dependent systems with common-cause failures, for example. We find no evidence that MAPs are used in practice and no works reviewed develop software demonstrators. We think there is considerable scope for modelling applications in transportation (e.g. dynamic train re-scheduling and last-mile logistics) and medical treatments, and MAPs may be more general than the literature that we have reviewed suggests.