ADVANCED MONITORING SYSTEM BASED ON UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES; FLEET AND INTEGRATED LOGISTIC SYSTEM SIZING BY MONTE-CARLO SIMULATION

SMAT-F1 is a research project funded by the Regione Piemonte (Italy) and promoted through the Comitato Promotore Distretto Aerospaziale Piemonte (Piedmont's Aerospace District Promoter Board). It is also co-funded by European Regional Development Fund (E.R.D.F.) within the Regional Operative Program 2007/2013. The main objective of SMAT-F1 research project is monitoring the Piedmont environment, both to accomplish with planned tasks and to deal with emergencies or other kinds of anomalies; the system concept was driven with the idea of 3 different classes of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), each one with several Unmanned Aerial Vehicles ((UAV )and its own Ground Control Station (GCS). The three GCS have to be interfaced with a single Station of Supervision and Control (SSC), to coordinate and control the operations of the whole system. The intrinsic complexity of the proposed system leads to the need of a thorough study about integration between the different assets playing working in this scenario, in terms of system availability and effectiveness; reaching the goal of a well-balanced system necessarily goes through the sizing of a proper logistic support system, in terms of operating and maintenance basis spread throughout the monitored territory, relative logistic resources amount, as well as the more convenient Reliability and Maintainability levels for various UAS and the best maintenance strategy for the 3 fleets. For this reason, considering the high number of choices available, it has been considered a simulation, through the implementation of a Monte-Carlo method, in order to verify the proposed model and define a complete operational environment for the described system.