Distributed Coordination Infrastructure for Highly Automated Operations Support System

Requirements to reduce human support costs and to manage increasing complexity are driving designers to incorporate intelligent systems into ground control systems. Individual tasks such as fault diagnosis and configuration management have been automated successfully. However, less progress has been made in coordinating sybsystem- and task-specific intelligent applications to work together cooperatively to achieve coherent system-level management. The proposed SBIR effort will investigate an innovative agent- oriented architecture to address this problem. The primary objective will be to design a generic infrastructure, which consists of a layered collection of distributed communication and coordination services. The second objective will be to design a uniform, high-level Application Programming Interface (API) to the infrastructure. Agents will interact with one another via API requests to the infrastructure. This approach greatly reduces the complexity of designing agents by externalizing communication and control functionality into an integrated framework of common, interoperable services. Maintainability and extensibility are correspondingly simplified. The resulting technology will enable NASA to design and prototype, implement, deploy, and operate highly automated ground control networks for space-based systems.