Real multi-Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) cooperative systems operate in complicated marine environments. The interaction between a multi-AUV cooperative system and its marine environment will affect the reliability of the system. Current is an important influencing factor of multi-AUV cooperative systems. A reliability index of multi-AUV cooperative systems known as System Reliable Probability (SRP) is proposed in this study. A method to calculate SRP is introduced, and the influence of current on SRP is discussed in detail. Current is considered an attack source, and the degree of its influence on SRP is calculated. As an example, the performance of this method is shown on two multi-AUV cooperative systems. Results show that the influence of the same current environment on different structures of the multi-AUV cooperative systems differs. This result provides a reference for the structure selection of multi-AUV systems. This study provides a practical method to estimate the reliability of multi-AUV cooperative systems.

In the real practice of multi-AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) cooperative systems, tasks or malfunctions will change the topology. The process of mutative topology structure will affect the reliability of multi-AUV cooperative system. The interactive Markov chains model, which is an intercurrent model of functional action and capability index, is selected to reflect the reliability of topology-changed multi-AUV cooperative systems. In this model, multi-AUV cooperative systems are described by the conception—“Action”. The concept of “action transfer” is used to describe the topology-changed multi-AUV cooperative system, and model checking is used to solve the interactive Markov chains, giving the probability of reliability within a certain time for the system. The result shows that the method proposed in this paper has a practical value.