Study of reliability of the on-tether subsystem of a tethered high-altitude unmanned telecommunication platform

High-altitude platform (HAP) are stations on an object at an altitude of around 15-50 km at a specified nominal fixed point relative to Earth. Tethered high-altitude platform (tHAP) are unmanned aerial vehicle that are connected to the ground via a tether with a lift height of 100 − 150 meters, and a multi-copter as high altitude mode. The reliability of the tHAP can be assessed with a focus on the tether that connects it to the ground. This article proposes a Markov model which obtain the reliability of the tHAP. The tether is considered to be made up of multiple wires in such a way that the tether still operates for a given number of functioning wires. The failure rates of the wires are dependent on the number of failed wires. Through the reliability analysis of the proposed Markov model, the key performance measures such as reliability of the system, mean time between failures and the probability of the system being reliable are computed. The optimal number of wires is also obtained via the numerical computation of the performance measures.