The Challenge of Configuring Model-Based Space Mission Planners
Jeremy Frank, Bradley J. Clement, John Marvin Chachere, Tristan B. Smith, Keith J. Swanson · 2012
Mission planning is central to space mission operations and has benefited from advances in model-based planning software, but developing a planning model still remains a difficult task. Mission planning constraints arise from many sources, including simulators and engineering specification documents. Ensuring that these constraints are correctly represented in the planner’s model is a challenge. As mission constraints evolve, planning domain modelers must add and update model constraints efficiently using the available source data, catching errors quickly, and correcting the model. We describe the current state of the practice in designing model-based mission planning tools and the challenges facing model developers. We then propose an Interactive Model Development Environment (IMDE) to configure mission planning systems by integrating modeling and simulation environments to reduce model editing time, generate simulations automatically to evaluate plans, and identify modeling errors automatically by evaluating simulation output.