Fault Management Architecture for Distributed Systems

Given the complex nature of current missions and spacecraft, an effective distributed onboard fault management system is pivotal to preempting failures, ensuring operational integrity, and sustaining the safety of space missions where real-time human oversight and intervention is either severely limited or not feasible. Distributed diagnosis across multiple modules that comprise the spacecraft can be achieved by designing local distributed subsystems based on global diagnosability analysis of the system, thus computing globally correct distributed diagnosis results with or without the use of a centralized coordinator. At its core, the essence of distributed onboard diagnosis lies in its ability to disseminate diagnostic capabilities across various subsystems and components within a spacecraft. This decentralization is not simply a design preference but a critical requirement, driven by the need for resiliency and redundancy in the face of component failures or external disruptions, and furthermore constrained by onboard data transmission limits and computational performance requirements. In an effort to address the aforementioned challenges, Qualtech Systems, Inc. (QSI) proposed the development of novel capabilities that work with QSI’s TEAMS tool suite towards evaluation and selection of potential fault management architecture while conforming to the requirements of a distributed system architecture that is being designed for the mission. These capabilities include novel algorithms and new software tools that leverage QSI’s TEAMS causal models and reasoning engines and will work effectively towards both developing the design and implementing the operations of a distributed fault management (FM) decision-making system such as for the Gateway vehicle and HelioSwarm NASA missions.