Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
When the spacecraft's onboard maneuver agent determines that this
planning must be done, the maneuver agent would contact the informa-
tional agent and describe its needs, including both the time interval to
be covered and the required modeling accuracy. The informational agent
then passes the request to the onboard ephemeris agent, which determines
whether or not it can create a special ephemeris product that can meet
the maneuver agent's needs. If the ephemeris agent can do so, the infor-
mational agent supplies it to the maneuver agent when the data becomes
available.
If the accuracy requirement cannot be met using the latest extended
precision seed vectors that were most recently received from the ground,
the informational agent requests that the communications agent send a
message to the ground station that an ephemeris update will have to be
uplinked before the maneuver planning agent can do its job.
Normally, the ground would then schedule a tracking event to update
the ephemeris knowledge and uplink an update to the spacecraft. However,
if time is short, the ground may elect to use the improved ephemeris
information to plan and schedule the next stationkeeping maneuver and
uplink it (including the entire schedule with all the spacecraft attitude
adjustment and subsequent rocket- or thruster-firing parameters) to the
spacecraft. The informational agent would then pass on the stationkeeping
maneuver (and the whole schedule itself) to the onboard scheduling agent,
informing the maneuver agent that it no longer needs to worry about the
next stationkeeping maneuver.
Personal assistant agents : Personal assistant agents act like a personal sec-
retary or assistant. They know the owner's goals, schedule, and personal
demands and help the owner manage his or her activities. More advanced
forms of assistants can interact with other agents or humans to ooad
activities.
One could imagine adapting and employing a personal-assistant type of
agent in the spacecraft operations domain by providing such an assistant
to a planner/scheduling agent in a scenario like the following. Suppose
that normally the planner/scheduler agent receives requests to schedule
various activities from other applications (attitude control, orbit maneu-
vering, power, communications, science instruments, etc.) and interleaves
all these requests to produce a conflict-free schedule. However, occasion-
ally a request will come either from an odd source (like a realtime ground
command) or a request might arrive after the schedule has been generated
and would affect the viability of activities already scheduled.
A personal assistant could be useful to the scheduling agent as a means
to intercept the “out-of-the-blue” requests and figure out what to do with
them. In other words, the personal assistant could decide that it is a re-
quest important enough to bother the scheduler regarding changing the
existing schedule (a realtime ground command would always be that im-
portant), or could decide the request is not important enough to make
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