Visual Builder of Rules for Spacecraft Onboard Real-Time Knowledge Base
Andrey A. Tyugashev · Smart innovation, systems and technologies · 2016
Fault tolerance of spacecraft remains one of the most complex problems in space missions. There are several ways to implement the “onboard intelligence allowing the recovery of a spacecraft in case of abnormal situations caused by hardware or software failures. The most common but inflexible way is “to disperse” the recovery logic in the source code of the flight control software. Our approach implies using onboard real-time knowledge base. The rules of the knowledge base could be added or refined from Earth over the radio channel on a timely basis. Currently, the rules of an onboard knowledge base should be specified in a table form, which entails some misunderstandings in the mission team and consequently leads to errors. The improved approach presented in the paper provides special tools–the visualizer and the visual builder of rules. The approach allows space mission operation engineers without special mathematical or programming background to define, visualize and refine knowledge base rules in a very easy manner. Tools prototypes are currently introduced at JSC Information Satellite Systems, Russia.