Ground Based Operations Support By Artificial Intelligence

The increasing number and sustained duration of future manned or unmanned space missions, the growing complexity of spacecraft, the increasing variety of payloads and the demand for maximum economic efficiency of space operations will lead to the evolution of large-scale ground based operations infrastructures of increasing complexity and sophistication. In order to enhance the manageability and safety of operations under these aspects and to limit the amount of highly skilled personnel required, thereby supporting an early economic attractivity of space, the utilization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as support for ground based operations appears to be a promising method which has received growing attention in recent years. In this paper, after an outline of the main areas of ground based operations support by AI, also these questions of the management of large distributed AI-systems within a complex communication environment are therefore addressed and required technology developments indicated which comprise in particular the direct or indirect utilization of databases and simulation facilities as knowledge sources for large AI-systems