Evaluation method for helicopter maritime search and rescue response plan with uncertainty

Helicopter plays an increasingly significant role in Maritime Search and Rescue (MSAR), and it will perform MSAR mission based on response plans when an accident occurs. Thus the rationality of response plan determines the success of MSAR mission to a large extent. However, with the impact of many uncertainty factors, it is difficult to evaluate response plans comprehensively before performing them. Aiming at these problems, an evaluation framework of helicopter MSAR response plan named UMAD is proposed in this paper, which reveals the influence mechanism of uncertainty factors based on Multi-Agent method and analyzes the mission flow based on Discrete Event System (DEVS) method. Furthermore, the evaluation criterion and indicators of response plan are extracted from the aspects of safety and effectiveness. Meanwhile, the Monte Carlo method is adapted to calculate the probability distribution and robustness of response plan comprehensive result. Finally, in order to illustrate the validity of this method, it is discussed and verified by an application example of evaluating multiple response plans to the same MSAR scenario. The results show that this method can analyze the influence of uncertainty more systematically and optimize response plans more comprehensively. (c) 2020 Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).