%A Bei XU, Guanghan BAI, Yun’an ZHANG, Yining FANG, Junyong TAO %T Failure analysis of unmanned autonomous swarm considering cascading effects %0 Journal Article %D 2022 %J Journal of Systems Engineering and Electronics %R 10.23919/JSEE.2022.000069 %P 759-770 %V 33 %N 3 %U {https://www.jseepub.com/CN/abstract/article_8730.shtml} %8 2022-06-18 %X

In this paper, we focus on the failure analysis of unmanned autonomous swarm (UAS) considering cascading effects. A framework of failure analysis for UAS is proposed. Guided by the framework, the failure analysis of UAS with crash fault agents is performed. Resilience is used to analyze the processes of cascading failure and self-repair of UAS. Through simu-lation studies, we reveal the pivotal relationship between resilience, the swarm size, and the percentage of failed agents. The simulation results show that the swarm size does not affect the cascading failure process but has much influence on the process of self-repair and the final performance of the swarm. The results also reveal a tipping point exists in the swarm. Meanwhile, we get a counter-intuitive result that larger-scale UAS loses more resilience in the case of a small percentage of failed individuals, suggesting that the increasing swarm size does not necessarily lead to high resilience. It is also found that the temporal degree failure strategy performs much more harmfully to the resilience of swarm systems than the random failure. Our work can provide new insights into the mechanisms of swarm collapse, help build more robust UAS, and develop more efficient failure or protection strategies.