Learning Agents for Autonomous Space Asset Management (LAASAM)

ABSTRACT: Current and future space systems will continue to grow in complexity and capabilities, creating a formidable challenge to monitor, maintain, and utilize these systems and manage their growing network of space and related ground-based assets. Integrated System Health Management (ISHM), and in particular, Condition-Based System Health Management (CBHM), is the ability to manage and maintain a system using dynamic real-time data to prioritize, optimize, maintain, and allocate resources. A complete, modern CBHM system comprises a number of functional capabilities: sensing and data acquisition; signal processing; conditioning and health assessment; diagnostics and prognostics; and decision reasoning. In addition, an intelligent Human System Interface (HSI) is required to provide the user/analyst with relevant context-sensitive information, the system condition, and its effect on overall situational awareness. Colorado Engineering (CEI) proposes to investigate an Intelligent Information Agent Architecture that will provide a complete range of CBHM and HSI functionality from data collection through recommendations for specific actions. The research will also leverage CEI"s expertise with provisioning management network architectures to define a system to autonomously manage a complex network of current and future space-based assets to optimize their utilization. BENEFIT: CEI has developed software and hardware technologies for a variety of government programs, and the team has transitioned over 37 products to production for use in DoD and Government systems. CEI also has experience commercializing technology developed under Government-funded programs. Products are packaged as COTS items, listed on a catalog price sheet, supported with technical application notes and marketing materials, and made available for sale to both the commercial and Government markets. CEI will promote technologies developed under this effort as part of its standard commercial product marketing and sales activities. The LAASAM technology developed under this program will realize condition-based health management for enhanced situational awareness of a wide variety of space-based assets and supporting ground equipment. A key platform target for Phase III transition is the next generation Global Positioning System Control Segment (GPS OCX) program awarded to Raytheon, CEI"s teammate on this proposal. Raytheon anticipates leveraging CEI"s LAASAM architecture to help address the program"s requirement for condition-based health management. GPS OCX is the 3rd generation GPS information processing system and requires extensive provisioning, health monitoring, prognostics, and distributed diagnostic capability. LAASAM will also have commercial applications. Large scale enterprise computing environments will find the enhanced quality-of-service and situational awareness afforded by LAASAM to be of great benefit to dynamically changing computational requirements across disparate organizational boundaries. Examples of applications that could benefit from LAASAM technology include enterprise file sharing, online entertainment and retail, telephony and cable systems, and image and video processing pipelines. In each case LAASAM provides a flexible environment that reduces system downtime while increasing resource utilization. CEI will leverage its marketing/sales resources to target companies like Amazon, Disney/Pixar, Google, and HP. Network-centric CBHM architectures could also benefit the oil industry"s need to manage off-shore resources, and this avenue will be also explored during both the development and commercialization activities.