Reliability indexes for multi-AUV cooperative systems

With the development of multi-autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) cooperative systems, the evaluation of their reliability is becoming more and more important. Aimed at the characteristics of the system, three reliability indexes-standard entropy of rank distribution, all-terminal reliability and standard natural connectivity are determined in this paper. Topology structure and underwater acoustic communication are considered. The calculation methods of the three reliability indexes are proposed, and the characteristics of these indexes are analyzed. The reliability indexes of two multi-AUV cooperative systems are obtained as examples. Results show that these three indexes reflect different aspects of reliability for multi-AUV cooperative systems. This paper provides some methods to evaluate the reliability of multi-AUV cooperative systems, which is of practical value.