UAV Logistics Support: Introduction

UAV Logistics Support refers to UAV lifetime operation support; scheduling issues; delivery of goods and services; maintenance, testing, and fielding of UAVs; design and operation for reliability, safety, availability, and maintainability; logistics for ground station support and mobile UAV platforms; and potentially human operator support. UAV Logistic Support Definition by Chiesa and Fioriti presents considerations and hypotheses about RAMS characteristics and logistic support options for operational fleets of UAS. At first, an outline of why logistic support is relevant for UAS in comparison with other complex systems is presented, followed by considerations why reliability, safety, and maintainability are relevant aspects for UAS, explaining how such characteristics can be achieved by design. Synthetic considerations regarding transportability, a characteristic strictly connected to safety, reliability, maintainability, and logistic operations, are discussed. It is stated that considering (in addition to technical features) targets, requirements, constraints at the origin of a fleet of UAS, fleet sizing, and related system support (elements and strategies), a useful tool to face such complex problems is stochastic simulation and in particular a Monte Carlo methodology, which is also discussed. UAV Logistics for Life-Cycle Management by Karaagac, Pakfiliz, Quagliotti, and Alemdaroglu provides the reader with general knowledge on UAV Logistics for Life-Cycle Management, focusing on current logistics challenges and possible