A Self-Scheduling Model for NASA Swarm-Based Exploration Missions Using ASSL

This article presents our research towards a self-scheduling mechanism for the NASA swarm-based exploration missions. By its virtue, ANTS (Autonomous Nano Technology Swarm) is considered to be an autonomic system with autonomic behavior that constitutes a self-scheduling mechanism, thus allowing task distribution on the fly with no human intervention. The goal of this work is to investigate a possible self-scheduling mechanism for ANTS, in accordance with the system and environmental conditions. In this paper, a formal task-scheduling approach is presented, and the ANTS self-scheduling behavior is modeled and specified with ASSL (Autonomic System Specification Language), where the group and individual tasks are structured in the fashion of TAFT (Time Aware Fault-Tolerant). TAFT is a recently devised approach that applies tolerance to timing violations.