Managing Mission Risk Through Performance‐Based Mission Processing Rate and Abort Decisions

Abstract

ABSTRACT Performance‐based tasks are widely adopted in complex engineering projects, where service contracts impose explicit performance benchmarks alongside potential financial losses triggered by system breakdown. Balancing contractual rewards, penalties, and inherent failure risks constitutes a core practical challenge. This paper defines performance‐based missions as contracted tasks with gains and losses determined by practical performance and planned workload. A two‐stage operating framework is set up, including a penalty‐preventing basic phase and a profit‐increasing phase with controlled failure risks. For joint optimization of load adjustment and mission abort, this study proposes coordinated controls on stage‐based processing rates and varied abort thresholds. To prevent excessive degradation and ensure compliance with baseline mission requirements, a moderately stable processing rate is utilized in the initial phase. In the subsequent phase, adaptive processing rate is performed to fully exploit incremental profits. In line with this design, we impose strict abort constraints in the early stage to avoid penalties when degradation compromises minimum targets, while adopting looser thresholds in the later stage to gain more profits at the cost of acceptable failure risks. With the proposed two‐stage rules, this study calculates mission completion probability and system survival probability, then builds an optimization model to derive optimal processing rates and abort thresholds that minimize operators' expected costs, ultimately improving contractual compliance and overall mission reliability.