Space Mission Impact Assessment using Intelligent Resource Management Techniques .

Assessing the impact on ongoing missions of threats to space systems is very difficult partly because it is not sufficient to simply assume the capabilities being provided to different missions by the space system in question will simply cease since those capabilities will be re-allocated to other resources.  To properly assess impact requires processing normally associated with intelligent resource management.  We have developed an innovative resource assignment/optimization system architecture which facilitates the development of more intelligent, resource management algorithms.  It has been applied to several domains involving similarly complex constraints, such as the complex line of sight (LOS) and range calculations between satellite-based sensors and three-dimensional ballistic missile trajectories.  The innovation is to apply that expertise and resource management architecture to the problem of assessing the impact of DCS situations and responses. The ultimate goal of this effort is to improve DCS impact assessment.  The Phase I research goals are to understand the current and future DCS impact assessment domain, investigate integration requirements, elaborate the heuristics, algorithms and techniques for improved DCS impact assessment, analyze them as to their feasibility, define the metrics for assessment performance, further prove the feasibility through prototype development, and develop the Phase II system design. BENEFIT: The most direct target for the results of this effort is, of course, the Air Force''''s DCS impact assessment and resource management domain, itself.  By both demonstrating significantly improved performance during Phase II and ensuring that the ultimate results can be operationalized, the Air Force will have a strong incentive to transition the Phase II development of the proposed Impact Assessor.  There are many similarities between DCS sensor resource management and satellite communication scheduling.  So the Space Communication Networks (AFSCN, DSN, GN, and SN) could all benefit from this technology.  The algorithms developed here could be marketed to our existing Air Force and Navy sensor customers interested in sensor resource management and coordination.  We are already marketing Aurora, our general intelligent planning and scheduling framework, and customizing it for a variety of domains.  The additional capabilities developed for DCS impact assessment can be synergistically marketed to the same clients.