Automatic, Intelligent OPIR Sensor Asset Scheduling

Stottler Henke proposes to apply our highly commercially successful Aurora Intelligent Scheduling Framework to Satellite Overhead Persistent Infrared (OPIR) automatic, optimizing scheduling for the Joint OPIR Planning Center (JOPC), which daily schedules many billions of dollars of OPIR assets. The JOPC receives OPIR collection requests from the defense and intelligence communities and manually attempts to optimize the utilization of the sensors, maximizing the quality and quantity of the most important collections. However, there are many issues to consider, and the thousands of requests exceed the capabilities of even the most expert schedulers to truly maximize the executed results, and more complex and more numerous requests are anticipated in the near future. Building on the current Aurora-based JOPC Automatic OPIR Scheduler prototype, in Phase I, we will perform another iteration of knowledge elicitation, prototype enhancement, and user demonstration and feedback/evaluation and Phase II system design. Phase II will consist of full-scale development, integration, testing, evaluation, and fielding. Our work has been de-risked by previous conversations with OPIR schedulers and developers of the system they currently use, prototyping and demonstrations to users of the application in Aurora, and the fact that Aurora has been successfully customized to many similar and diverse domains.