Modelling multi-platform phased mission system reliability

This paper looks at the concept of multi-platform phased missions, wherein a number of individual platforms work together to achieve an overall mission goal. Single platform phased missions and the methods used to predict their failure probability are introduced. An overview of one particular analysis technique, Binary Decision Diagrams (BDD), is given followed by a discussion of the characteristics of a multi-platform phased mission and how its phase failure probabilities and hence its overall mission failure probability can be calculated. A simple example system is introduced and used to demonstrate the multi-platform phased mission reliability methodology. The method is seen to give a suitable basis for modelling multi-platform phased mission system reliability.