Automation in Context: Planning Manned Space Exploration Activities

Abstract

We report progress made on developing a manned space activity planning application and the intelligent software that assists the crew in using this application. Our approach is to integrate existing automated planning and scheduling software with intelligent assistant software that mediates user interaction with these planner and schedulers. This software assists the user in incrementally building a plan and provi des for interim plan evaluation and modification. It assists the user in specifying activity preferences, making plan trade-offs at constraint violation and resource contention, and understanding the implications of these choices on the resulting plan. Th e final planning toolkit will produce planning products such as crew schedules and control plans for life support systems and robotics, will monitor execution of plans, and will assist the user when re-planning due to unforeseen situations.