Reliability Assessment of UAV Fleets

UAVs have a great potential of application for monitoring, search, detection, communication, delivery and transportation of cargo in various sectors of economy. In spite of this, the existing software and hardware, as well as legal limitations, prevent the wide application of UAVs. There is intensive research related to automation and optimization of missions of one or more UAVs in various application areas. However, the execution of missions of both individual vehicles and their homogeneous or heterogeneous groups depends on the reliability issues of these technical devices, UAVs fleets, and control systems. In this paper, we present models for assessing fleet reliability of UAVs that are managed centralized or decentralized. The method is based on the representation of the fleet as a Binary-State System. The following topologies are considered: (a) a homogenous irredundant drone fleet, (b) a homogenous hot stable redundant drone fleet, (c) a heterogeneous irredundant drone fleet, and (d) a heterogeneous hot stable redundant drone fleet. For the listed topologies, reliability estimates were obtained as a function of the number of primary and redundant UAVs.