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In designing autonomous vessels for long-duration independent operation, maintaining the performance of machinery systems without human intervention is a key challenge. Designers are faced with a range of potential system architecture choices but have little guidance on which will be optimal. Working only with high-reliability components can increase the probability of completing a voyage successfully, though the availability of such components may be limited. Alternatively, designers can select a redundant architecture to provide options for reconfiguration if a component fails during a voyage, such architectures typically have weight, space, and cost implications. This work presents a parametric exploration of the probability of system failures over time under different architectures. The reliability of individual components is expressed through exponential probability distributions and the weight of each component is approximated. Two systems are presented and the effectiveness of various architectures for both systems is compared. A simple design penalty function is also tracked to capture the different architectures’ weight and implication number of components. From this study optimal architectures for long-term autonomous missions are proposed.
Ware et al. (Sun,) studied this question.