3. Introducing Resilience into Multi-UAV System-of-Systems Network

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are used in a variety of missions such as surveillance, law enforcement, agriculture, search and rescue, and payload delivery. Multiple UAVs are simultaneously deployed by both government and civilian organizations to achieve superior coverage and a more flexible response to disrupting events. In this chapter, multi-UAV systems are discussed from a system-of-system (SoS) perspective. It is hypothesized that the key advantage of this approach is the flexibility afforded to study different interaction protocols and conduct trade-offs in terms of both resource allocation and function allocation to the different members in the multi-UAV SoS. It is also hypothesized that this approach will allow studying of SoS resilience and resilience approaches, and if resilience approaches are chosen systematically the chances of safe and fast recovery will increase significantly while dealing with disruptions. This chapter also discusses single- and multi-UAV modeling and presents preliminary simulation results.