Planning to Explore: Using a Coordinated Multisource Infrastructure to Overcome Present and Future Space Flight Planning Challenges

Elevated levels of NASA space activities, from deployment of the new Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) and completion of the International Space Station (ISS), to the planned lunar missions and permanent lunar bases, will put an even greater strain on this largely manual process. While several attempts to automate it have been made in the past, none have fully succeeded. In this paper we describe the current NASA planning methods, outline their advantages and disadvantages, discuss the planning challenges of upcoming missions and propose a distributed planning/scheduling framework (CMMD) aimed at unifying and optimizing the planning effort.

CMMD will not attempt to make the process completely automated, but rather serve in a decision support capacity for human managers and planners. It will help manage information gathering, creation of partial and consolidated schedules, inter-team negotiations, contingencies investigation, and rapid re-planning when the situation demands it. The first area of CMMD application will be planning for Extravehicular Activities (EVA) and associated logistics.

Other potential applications, not only in the space flight domain, and future research efforts will be discussed as well.