Optimal inspections and mission abort policies for multistate systems

At many instances, information on the state of a multistate system executing a mission is obtained via the costly inspections performed at discrete instants of time. Therefore, the corresponding cost-wise optimal mission abort policy that takes into account the state of a system should be designed accordingly. In this paper, we introduce an optimal mission abort policy that minimizes the expected costs due to inspections, mission failure and loss of a system. A system operates in a random environment modeled by a renewal process of shocks. With each shock, its state can deteriorate with certain probabilities that can eventually result in the total failure. The decision to abort or to continue operation depends on the number of experienced shocks and on the state of a system that is revealed only at inspections. The corresponding cost minimization problem is formulated and the necessary relationships for solving it are derived. Detailed numerical illustrations and discussions are presented.