Survivability - An information fusion process metric from an operational perspective

This paper presents a new probabilistic approach to determine survivability of reconfigurable systems as a system-level performance metric in an operational environment. In contrast to known methods of estimating survivability in terms of susceptibility and vulnerability, the proposed method (1) includes directional threats on various subsystems into the analysis and (2) provides a framework for operational information fusion processes to better sustain unpredictable or hostile environmental disturbances. In this paper, we distinguish the survivability and reliability metrics, where we demonstrate the importance of survivability metric in a dynamic information fusion process for an operational environment. We present our main result using a piping system of fluid flow; however, the concept easily extends to other flow systems, such as power networks, computer communication networks, and military reconfigurable information systems, etc. Survivability of these large scale reconfigurable networks depend on their capability of assessing directional threats, situation awareness, and their ability to dynamically adapt to new configurations. The proposed survivability method embedded in an information fusion environment can be used for real time dynamic reconfiguration of large scale systems, optimization and routing of data and information, and detect and mitigate hardware and software threats.