A UNIFIED FAILURE/DAMAGE APPROACH TO BATTLE DAMAGE REGENERATION : APPLICATION TO GROUND MILITARY SYSTEMS

Availability is a determining factor in systems characterization. Because they must act in a hostile environment, military systems are particularly vulnerable in situations of non-availability. Military weapon systems availability can be affected by system failures or by damage to the system, and in either case, system regeneration is needed. However, very few availability studies take battlefield damage into account in their more general dependability studies. This paper takes a look at the issues and trends related to the study of battlefield damage, specifically those related to the modeling of such damage and it proposes a unified approach to regeneration engineering that exploits the parallelism between failure and damage in order to manage system failure and damage to the system.