Simulation-Based Mission Mobility Reliability Analysis of Off-Road Ground Vehicles

This paper develops a simulation-based mission mobility reliability (MMR) analysis framework to account for uncertainty in mobility prediction of off-road ground vehicles in mission planning. A concept of MMR is first proposed to quantify reliability of a mission path which passes through different types of soils. A single-loop Kriging surrogate modeling method is then employed to overcome the computational challenge in MMR assessment caused by expensive mobility simulations. Built upon the surrogate model-based MMR analysis, a dynamic updating scheme is proposed to update the MMR estimation using online mobility data, during the course of a specific mission and for a particular vehicle. The online dynamic updating of MMR allows us for effective and dynamic decision-making during the mission phase, thus proactively avoid rare events of immobility during the mission. A case study demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed MMR analysis and updating framework.