Simulation Model of Mission Effectiveness for Military Systems

Mission effectiveness, the probability of successfully accomplishing the mission, is a practical measure of a unit´s usefulness. Each unit has 2 s-independent components (hardware and operator) in series. Mission effectiveness for a particular sortie and unit is determined by finding the joint probability measure of the following 4 factors: the availability of the unit at the beginning of a sortie; the sortie-reliability of the unit; the conditional probability of successful performance of the unit in a given environment; and the conditional probability of the successful operator performance during a sortie as a function of time since last retraining. A computer simulation model is developed. It is more general and practical than Markov models, since the simulation model can directly handle any empirical probability distributions for the random variables whereas the Markov approach is limited to the exponential distribution. The simulation model appears to be a semi-Markov model where each transition is a regeneration point.