Risk-aware task termination strategy for mission-critical systems with preventive inspection scheduling

Modern safety-critical systems often face a critical trade-off between mission completion and failure prevention during mission execution. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel risk-aware decision-making strategy for systems governed by Gamma process degradation with an unknown scale parameter. The system performs a mission with fixed duration, undergoing periodic inspections at preventive intervals to assess the degradation level. The parameter estimation is continuously updated during mission execution via the maximum likelihood method. By formulating the problem as a finite-horizon Markov decision process, we derive a state-dependent control limit policy that achieves an optimal balance between operational risk and mission security. Theoretical analysis reveals state-dependent control limits associated with degradation levels that vary monotonically with the inspection phase. Numerical studies demonstrate the framework’s applicability, providing a principled solution for preventive risk management in condition monitoring systems, ensuring both mission reliability and system safety.