Using Formal Methods and Agent-Oriented Software Engineering for Modeling NASA Swarm-Based Systems

NASA is conducting research on advanced technologies for future exploration using intelligent swarms of robotic vehicles. One of these missions is the Autonomous Nano Technology Swarm (ANTS) mission that will explore the asteroid belt using 1,000 cooperative autonomous spacecraft. From an engineering point of view, the complexity and emergent behavior of this kind of system is one of the main challenges that has to be overcome, since it makes the behavior of the swarm unpredictable. In NASA, many approaches are being explored towards this goal, mainly, a tailored software engineering approach, called agent-oriented software engineering, and formal methods. In this paper, we report on the main advances we have made towards modeling, implementing, and testing NASA swarms-based concept missions