Name
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
NASA's Vision for Space Exploration and the missions it comprises pose large-scale systems-engineering problems with concomitant large-budget investment decisions involving multiple disciplines (e.g., science, engineering, information technology), multiple constraints (e.g., time, mass, energy consumption), myriad uncertainties, and a hierarchical structure of problem decomposition with resolution of increasing fidelity. Navigation through this sea of complexity is greatly facilitated by an analytical system that includes optimization and analysis software tools. The interplay between program planning and decision-support tools is seen here in a case study of a hypothetical mission on the Moon. The architecture of one such tool, HURON, is discussed and its application is illustrated in a comparison of the relative productivity of employing two pressurized or two unpressurized robotic rovers with two pairs of astronauts to conduct a specified group of activities. For the mission scenarios studied, a pair of pressurized rovers is shown to be significantly more productive than a pair of unpressurized rovers when calculating work accomplished divided by marginal operational costs. The HURON decision-support system presented and successfully applied in this paper deals explicitly with combinatorial explosion of a huge design space in scheduling the activities of agents subject to constraints, deploys a productivity function as a measure of value, and automatically determines a ranked sensitivity list of important inputs. The approach is applicable to a wide class of large-scale systems-engineering applications. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng This is a US Government work and, as such, is in the public domain in the United States of America. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2010 | 10.1002/sys.v13:3 | Systems Engineering |
Keywords | Field | DocType |
NASA Vision for Space Exploration,lunar mission planning,astronaut-robot teams,multiagent planning,multiagent scheduling,optimal space mission planning | Information system,Hierarchical control system,Systems engineering,Ranking,Information technology,Decision support system,Information science,Operations research,Vision for Space Exploration,Engineering,Finance,Combinatorial explosion | Journal |
Volume | Issue | ISSN |
13 | 3 | 1098-1241 |
Citations | PageRank | References |
0 | 0.34 | 7 |
Authors | ||
9 | ||
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Charles R. Weisbin | 1 | 151 | 315.88 |
| Joseph Mrozinski | 2 | 0 | 0.34 |
| William Lincoln | 3 | 10 | 2.34 |
| Alberto Elfes | 4 | 1470 | 416.36 |
| Kacie Shelton | 5 | 7 | 1.47 |
| Hook Hua | 6 | 0 | 2.03 |
| Jeffrey H. Smith | 7 | 10 | 2.81 |
| Virgil Adumitroaie | 8 | 2 | 1.05 |
| Robert Silberg | 9 | 0 | 0.68 |