A method of using fuzzy hypergraphs to evaluate structural and technological survivability of attitude control systems for unmanned spacecraft

Successful completion of a mission by an unmanned spacecraft (USC), both under nominal operational conditions both under examined contingencies and unexamined off-nominal situations is possible through designing survivability into the USC onboard system (OS). An analysis of current methods for evaluating USC OS survivability during their configuration management and reconfiguration under conditions of examined in-flight contingencies widely used in the design and development of the said USC has shown that these methods are not acceptable for evaluating the USC OS survivability in case of unexamined off-nominal situations in flight. This calls for development of conceptually novel methodological and procedural framework for evaluating structural survivability of USC OS configurations that take into account the level of participation of functional elements (FE) and OS subsystems in the USC control operations under various scenarios of the mission plan implementation. The paper proposes an original approach to evaluating the structural and technological survivability of the USC OS based on a fuzzy hypergraph formal representation of the operations to control the USC attitude, where the edges of the hypergraph connect the FE and OS subsystems that support the implementation of this or that specific control process. The paper also shows how one could use for the quantitative evaluation of the structural and technological survivability of a specific USC OS configuration the results of differentiation of a fuzzy hypergraph that could be visualized as a fuzzy hypergraph of technological independence of OS FE. Such an approach makes it possible to analyze the effects of FE on OS, identify the most critical elements, which have the lowest technological independence under mission plan implementation conditions, which could be used for providing a rationale for the required level of structural and functional redundancy of USC elements and subsystems introduced during various phases in its life cycle.