Abstract
Systems operating in random shock environments face a high risk of mission failure that can result in substantial damages and economic losses. To ensure operational safety and cost-effectiveness, it is crucial to design profit-aware mission abort policies that balance operation costs and profits, penalties from mission aborts and system failures, and rewards for successful mission completion. However, few models incorporate such profit-oriented considerations and those that do fail to consider the effects of external shocks on system reliability. This paper contributes by modeling and optimizing a joint expected mission profit (EMP)-based abort and inspection policy for systems that deteriorate and fail due to external shocks. The inspection reveals the number of experienced shocks, based on which the EMP-based decision on whether to continue or abort the mission is made. The EMP evaluation and optimization are investigated for three scenarios (missions without or with partial work profit and missions with imperfect shock detection) and validated using case studies on an unmanned aerial vehicle delivery mission and a drilling mission. Sensitivity analyses are conducted to quantify the effects of cost parameters, shock resistance and detection uncertainty on the optimal policy, providing engineering insights into the design of EMP-maximized inspection and abort policies.