Reliability Modeling And Evaluation Method For UAV Swarm Communication Coverage Mission

Unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)has the characteristics of small volume,light weight,strong concealment,low cost and simple takeoff and landing conditions.It has strong environmental adaptability and survivability,and is more suitable for dangerous or repetitive work.However,a single UAV is limited by factors such as detection capability and weapon load,making it difficult to complete complex tasks.The UAV swarm is composed of UAVs with a certain degree of autonomy.Through the real-time data sharing,multi-unit network,and coordination among UAVs,the overall task can be achieved.With the increasing scale of UAV swarm,the reliability has attracted more and more attention.Different from manned platform,the reliability of UAV swarm shows the characteristics of a transition from "platform-centered" to "mission-centered ".Therefore,it is necessary to combine different tasks to construct corresponding mission reliability modeling and evaluation methods.Communication network coverage is a typical application scenario of UAV swarm.It is important in theoretical and practical application to evaluate its mission reliability.The mission reliability modeling and evaluation of UAV swarm communication coverage is focused on two aspects: one is whether the communication coverage task of the target area can be completed,and the other is whether the communication network constructed by the UAV swarm can reliably transmit information.This paper has carried out the following research on the above two aspects:Firstly,aiming at the issue of communication coverage in the target area,a distributed self-organizing coverage algorithm of UAV swarm based on two virtual forces is proposed.The quantitative determination method of virtual force weight coefficient and distributed behavior design rules are given,and the self-organizing coverage algorithm is used to guide the individual UAV to adjust motion to achieve the maximum coverage of the target area.Simulation experiments show that the proposed algorithm can provide a more sufficient coverage of the target area.Then,aiming at the reliability modeling issue of UAV swarm communication network,a reliability modeling method based on multi-state network is proposed.The state of the link is divided by the communication overlap between UAVs,which better characterizes the state distribution of swarm communication.On this basis,in view of the difficult problem that the reliability calculation complexity of multi-state networks increases exponentially with the swarm size,focus on the approximate solution method of multi-state network reliability based on the minimal path vectors,a heuristic algorithm to optimize the ordering of the minimal path vectors is proposed.Finally,taking the specific communication coverage task of UAV swarm as an example,the mission reliability modeling and evaluation process is discussed,which provides technical support for decision-makers.