Form 9.B Project Summary
Chron:
971240
Proposal Number:
24.01-3474
Project Title:
A Distributed Environment for Onboard
Planning and Scheduling
Technical Abstract (Limit 200 words)
Spacecraft autonomy has the potential for effecting
significant cost reductions in mission operation by
eliminating the need for dedicated ground staff. In
an autonomous operating mode, operators will
communicate only high-level goals and deadlines
directly to the spacecraft. The spacecraft will then
perform its own planning and scheduling,
decomposing the schedules into a set of primitive
actions by optimizing onboard resources, and then
execute autonomously. In this proposal, we present
a distributed approach to address this problem,
where a set of agents representing onboard
subsystems communicate and cooperate to achieve
goals. This kind of distributed planning and
scheduling emphasizes a decentralized organization,
where plans are generated and executed
co-operatively and concurrently by the subsystem
agents, taking into account system flight rules and
resource constraints. We address specifically the
resource optimization problem by its explicit
representation within the problem domain. The
reasoning performed by an agent will be based on a
constraint propagation paradigm, using hierarchical
knowledge structures popular in the AI planning
community. We are specifically targeting our effort
to enhance the existing planning and scheduling
capability of JPL's New Millennium Remote Agent
(NMRA) architecture.
Potential Commercial Applications (Limit 200 words)
There are potential commercial applications for
three important aspects of the technology in the
proposed distributed environment: 1) intelligent
agents and multi-agent systems; 2) planning and
scheduling; and 3) resource optimizations.
Intelligent agent technology is directly applicable to
commercial satellite systems, telecommunications
satellites and remote sensing space systems.
Applications of multi-agent technology exist in
airport control towers, electronic stock exchanges,
and transportation systems. Planning, scheduling
and resource optimization technology is directly
applicable to transportation and inventory control.
Name and Address of Principal Investigator (Name,
Organization Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip)
Subrata K. Das
Charles River Analytics
55 Wheeler Street
Cambridge , MA 02138-1125
Name and Address of Offeror (Firm Name, Mail Address,
City/State/Zip)
Greg L. Zacharias
Charles River Analytics
55 Wheeler Street
Cambridge , MA 02138-1125