WITH APPLICATIONS TO SPACE STATION PLANNING

Past spaceflight experience has shown that current methodologies for performing crew activity scheduling will not be sufficient to support future space station requirements. Current practices for forming Space Shuttle schedules are highly man-hour intensive, and are not amenable to rapid dynamic replanning in the presence of unanticipated or unforeseen events. There is also no way to include the preferences of the crewmembers (for example, the tasks they wish to perform, and when they wish to perform them) into the scheduling process. Further, presently used methods do not incorporate the capabilities of mathematical operations research techniques to perform optimization of schedules in order to maximize the completion of mission goals and find tradeoffs among factors such as differing crewmember skill levels. Scheduling problems have frequently plagued the Space Shuttle, which only operates for periods of a week at a time; on a continuously manned space station in the 1990's, current practices will be totally unacceptable. In order to bridge these difficulties, this thesis develops an iterative scheduling techniqu