A distributed approach for space system formation operation autonomous planning and scheduling

The paper presents a possible approach to the planning-scheduling to be faced by a space system formation to accomplish specific mission goals with limited on-board resources. A multi-agent architecture is here selected to cope with flexibility and reliability requirements typical for a system that must be operative in a hostile and not completely known environment such the space environment is. A distributed versus a central architecture is here preferred, and the communication protocol and negotiation mechanisms are investigated. The CSP problem is solved both by applying to the STN scheme a Shortest Path algorithm and a Maximum Weighted Cliques technique for the resources management. The applicative scenario here proposed consists of an Earth spacecraft formation devoted to accomplish both single and globally shared activities by exploiting both local and global resources. Reconfiguration maneuvers are included, to be accomplished by an electric propulsion module. That kind of operations make the set of temporal constraints to be satisfied by the final schedule more complex as the search mechanism has to cope with a nested optimal control problem. A dedicated light and fast algorithm to solve the control problem for the reconfiguration maneuvers has been developed. Preliminary results according to the formation flying application are discussed