Enhancing NASA's Procedure Representation Language to Support Planning Operations

Automation and autonomy are key elements in realizing the vision for space exploration. The NASA Exploration Technology Development Program (ETDP) has been developing a procedure representation language (PRL) that both captures the form of traditional procedures and allows for automatic translation into code that can be executed by NASA-developed autonomous executives. However, PRL is in a relative infancy with regard to supporting many of the autonomous software components being developed by NASA, specifically automated planners and schedulers. In this proposal we will design and test additional representations to PRL for resources, inter-procedure constraints and subprocedures so that automated planners can take better advantage of the PRL-generated procedures. The work plan includes developing scenarios and use cases, developing requirements for planning -- both manual and automated -- from the scenarios, developing XML tags for the PRL changes, testing the PRL enhancements in the use cases with robotic and life support simulations, and translating the changes into planning languages with proven semantics.