Peer-to-peer planning for space mission control

Planning and scheduling for space operations entails the development of applications that embed intimate domain knowledge of distinct areas of mission control, while allowing for significant collaboration among them. The separation is useful because of differences in the planning problem, solution methods, and frequencies of replanning that arise in the different disciplines. For example, planning the activities of human spaceflight crews requires some reasoning about all spacecraft resources at timescales of minutes or seconds, and is subject to considerable volatility. Detailed power planning requires managing the complex interplay of power consumption and production, involves very different classes of constraints and preferences, but once plans are generated they are relatively stable. A prototype application has been developed that separately supports Crew planning and Power planning for the International Space Station (ISS). Domain requirements have been modeled in a significant level of detail, and loosely-coupled integration has been demonstrated in a realistic scenario. The integration is enabled by implementing a generic collaboration architecture that can be used to coordinate the work of any number of planning domains. The architecture is used to integrate two different planners employing different underlying algorithms and data structures, by means of mapping the overlapping facets of the plans.