Engineering Resilience into Multi-UAV Systems

Multi-UAV Operations are an area of great interest in government, industry, and research community. In multi-UAV operations, a group of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are deployed to carry out missions such as search and rescue, or disaster relief. This paper discusses multi-UAV system in the face of disruptions from a system-of-systems perspective. Each UAV, with some decision-making capability, is assigned a task to perform within a multi-UAV system. When these vehicles operate in an open operational environment, the ability to cope with disruptive events becomes especially important. In other words, multi-UAV system needs to be resilient. A methodological framework to dynamically evaluate resilience alternatives during mission operation is discussed in this paper. This framework allows system to select appropriate alternative given the current context. Simulation results show that such framework can be created and used dynamically to evaluate resilient alternatives for multi-UAV system.