An approach to space mission planning in order to solve the problem of real-time planning by using the planning and scheduling strategy from artificial intelligence area

摘要

The space area community has a strong interest in reducing costs related to control of satellites. However, the cost reduction is a goal difficult to achieve due to some characteristics of the satellite control facilities. In this environment, ground stations send telecommand to satellite during the periods of visibility. Apart from the cost restrictions, the ground stations can track multiple satellites, and consequently, scheduling conflicts may occur between different satellite passes over the same ground station. In particular case of INPE - Brazilian National Institute for Space Research, there is a concern to increase the reliability of mission operations, which in some cases are still manually performed. There is a great demand to implement planning methods and automatic control. Due to this set of requirements, which highlight the complexity of this environment, and the need to reduce costs associated with the satellite control, this paper proposes an architecture consisting of modules that manage the allocation of ground resources for tracking multiple satellites and plan to control operations of these satellites. This architecture adopts concepts and technical planning of the Artificial Intelligence area to generate plans aiming at solving the satellite control problem.