Agent-Based Collaborative Scheduling for AFSCN

Next-gen AFSCN scheduling software will need to incorporate two aspects that are missing from existing solutions. One is the need to incorporate fuzzy time constraints and dynamic priorities. The other aspect is the need to provide support to the manual negotiations that currently take place between the NOC schedulers and the SOC users for resolving conflicts. To address the first aspect, we propose a multi-objective optimization formulation that is able to incorporate nonlinear fuzzy constraints and priorities. To address the second aspect, we propose an intelligent agent based automated negotiation technique. The resulting agent-based collaborative scheduling approach is well-suited to the next-gen AFSCN enterprise software upgrade. BENEFIT: The next-gen AFSCN upgrade is the first candidate for technology transition. Decentralized collaborative scheduling using agents has applications in many other optimization and scheduling applications in DOD and in the private sector. Scheduling satellite usage in the commercial world is an obvious target. Both the military and the commercial satellite industries will benefit from the proposed technology.