New control problems associated with a proposed future space transportation infrastructure

Operation management is an essential technology for the “OTV (Orbital Transfer Vehicle) Network” which has been proposed as a promising space transportation infrastructure for the next century. In addition to the nominal mode scheduling, the management system must quickly re-make the schedule in the case of failures of some system elements, inputs of urgent missions or mission alterations. This paper analyses this management as a new control problem, and proposes a distributed artificial intelligence-type system architecture to deal with it. The effectiveness of the system has been verified by simulation studies assuming practical problem settings.