A Group Maintenance Method of Drone Swarm Considering System Mission Reliability
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
In this paper, A grouping strategy and maintenance method based on multi-layer complex network system evaluation considering cost and system task reliability is proposed to establish the cluster system topology model and evaluate the system task reliability, multi-objective planning of system mission reliability and system cost optimizes the maintenance grouping strategy. There are the following problems:
1) The literature review is satisfactory, but more existed path prediction method should be discussed. Compared with other works based on graph theory, what is the innovation of this paper?
2) Check the semantic expression of P2 line 83.
3) The font of Figure 4 in P7 is too small, please adjust it to fit the article.
4) What is the unit of total maintenance cost in P12 Table 5?
5) What is the correlation between the three-layer nodes of a single drone? Is there any difference between multiple failures and single failures of three- layer nodes in the study?
6) The node failures in the communication layer and the structure layer are mapped to the disappearance of the corresponding nodes in the mission layer in the swarm network. So how to reflect multi-layer complex network missions in P6 line 206?
Overall, the paper is publishable after revising.
Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
The respected author aiming at the problem that the traditional unit maintenance method cannot meet the maintenance requirements of the complex swarm system. They present a mission-oriented system maintenance grouping method. The method validation and case analysis results show that the complex network method can effectively evaluate system-level reliability, solve the trade-off between cost and system reliability.
I have the following recommendations or concerns:
1. The language expression needs a lot of improvement, and many expressions are redundant. There are also many sentences that are unclear and confusing. It's worth noting that too many long and difficult sentences may lead the reader to misunderstand some algorithm principles.
2. The resolution of the images is too low for the reader to see the details, so authors need to redraw them or upload more accurate images.
3. In this paper, the introduction of the UAV swarm missions is still lacking. I suggest the authors to go through some of the related papers such as: ‘Dynamic Reallocation Model of Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Tasks in Emergent Adjustment Scenarios’ and ‘A review on representative swarm intelligence algorithms for solving optimization problems: Applications and trends’.
I look forward to the author's revises to the above comments.
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
The paper proposes a method to ensure the maintenance of UAVs that are part of a swarm and develop a mission. This maintenance is planned not to affect the mission's performance and can help the agents that require it. The problem becomes a multi-objective optimization problem addressed with decentralized policy to the agents that make up the swarm.
In order to improve the paper and increase its impact on the scientific community, I recommend making the following additions, changes, or corrections:
1. The abstract should name (one or two sentences) the proposed method's performance evaluation and highlight the reached results. The reader needs to know if the objective was reached. It is necessary to describe in a few words the level of effectiveness of the method.
2. The Paper should include a strong state-of-the-art study. Therefore, it is necessary to approach the principal aspects of the proposed method and base the study of the state of the art based on the methods related to the main elements of the proposed one.
3. After line 78, a paragraph naming and explaining the principal differences between the proposed method and the models described in short state-of-the-art depicted previously to this paragraph should be introduced.
4. Before the last paragraph of the introduction, it should include a paragraph where the paper contributions would be named and lightly explained. The related work study should support this contribution.
5. I strongly advise creating a complete section called state of the art.
6. Table 1. describes a swarm as a graph. It is a typical and very known description of a swarm as a graph network. This graph is not needed.
7. In section 3.1: Are they assumptions or hypotheses? They are not the same.
8. Section 4.3 is not a comparative study. Instead, this section explores the proposed method's performance and desirability of some parameters. This section should be extended, carrying out a deeper study of the effects of the combination of the most critical parameters of the proposed method.
9. A completely new section should be included where a qualitative and quantitative comparison of the performance of the proposed method is made vs. the methods highlighted in state-of-the-art and that claim to fulfill the same functionality.
10. There is no fundamental analysis of results where the effect of the different parameters and variables of the proposed method is established. It should be analyzed the impact of each parameter on the performance of the proposed method.
11. In the conclusions section, an analysis must indicate the proposed method's pros and cons. It must be supported by the analysis of the effect of the parameters that were previously required
Author Response
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Reviewer 4 Report
This paper discusses an interesting and generally useful topic in the field of drones, the problem of swarm drone maintenance, a challenging subfield of robotics. The reliability of the system and the time cost on maintenance are considered in the paper. The article is well organized and the presented results appear to be correct. However, the revision should take into account the following issues:
1) The content and structure of article abstracts and introductions should be better organized. The abstract should succinctly state what algorithm was used in this paper and what results were obtained. Do not introduce drone applications and method comparisons in the abstract, these should be in the introduction. The literature review in the introduction needs to supplement the literature to explain what others have done on this issue, what are the shortcomings, and highlight the advantages of the algorithm proposed in this paper.
2) For the convenience of readers, the author should give the time and space complexity of the proposed algorithm, and briefly give the calculation process of the complexity, so as to design the optimization strategy.
3) The experiments used to demonstrate that the algorithm takes into account the reliability of the system's mission needs to be improved. The experimental results show that the average reliability under the timely maintenance strategy is generally higher than that under any group maintenance. When performing some special missions, the reliability of the system is very important. It is feasible to exchange the time cost of maintaining reliability for the reliability of the system. It does not directly mean that the timely maintenance algorithm must be worse than the proposed algorithm, and comparative experiments should be added. It shows that the advantages of the proposed algorithm are not only in the time spent.
4) References and citations in articles should be edited according to journal requirements. There are also a few grammar and spelling mistakes in the article.
Author Response
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Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Reviewer 2 Report
No Comments.
Reviewer 3 Report
Thank you for considering the recommendations.
Reviewer 4 Report
The authors have responded carefully to the comments. All the questions and concerns have been answered and addressed appropriately. I therefore would recommend to accept the manuscript for publication after minor revision.
