Reactive Planning Framework for Spacecraft Assembly Integration & Testing

Planning and scheduling of the activities that occur during spacecraft Assembly, Integration & Testing (AI&T) is a computational challenge. General purpose project management tools are too brittle and cannot be used to interactively modify existing plans during project execution. The planner should take into account ongoing changes and failures that occur in the assembly environment and respond promptly. UtopiaCompression’s proposed solution is a reactive and hierarchical planning suite that incorporates an innovative and intuitive Object-Oriented design. The framework includes a novel Reactive component that monitors the state of the system and repairs or replaces its current plan if there are delays or other failures. Plan repair is achieved by computationally efficient local search algorithm. The framework includes a backup scheme and continuously searches for the most relevant plan in its repository with relation to the current environment settings. In order to encode complex models, we introduce an intuitive Object-Oriented form for designing models. The proposed system is integrated with distributed constraint processing algorithms. In addition, the system is designed to decompose plan goals and perform parallel planning over the sub-problems. A local search scheme is utilized to merge the different plans.