USRA Led Team Sees Successful Deployment of Orbital Communications Adapter Monitoring System (OCAMS) at International Space Station Mission Control
July 08, 2008
Contact: David Bell
650-604-0771
dbell@riacs.edu
The Orbital Communications Adapter (OCA) Officer is responsible for uplinking and downlinking all files to and from the International Space Station. These files include schedules, procedures, commands, email, photographs, health data, newspapers, etc. The agent-based OCA Mirroring system (OCAMS) developed at Ames automates part of the OCA Officer's workload. Credit: NASA
Columbia, MD, July 8, 2008 - Work done by a team led by Dr. Maarten Sierhuis of USRA's Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science (RIACS) culminated earlier this year in the successful deployment of the Orbital Communications Adapter Monitoring System (OCAMS) for use at the NASA Johnson Space Center's (JSC) International Space Station (ISS) Mission Control. Following a successful two-week testing phase, "live" 24/7 operations using OCAMS began on July 8, 2008 by the ISS Orbital Communication Adapter (OCA) Flight Control Team as part of their work process.
OCAMS, the first application of intelligent multi-agent system (MAS) technology in NASA's mission control operations, was developed using the Brahms multi-agent software tools. Based on a Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) and Subsumption architecture and using a proprietary Agent-Oriented Language (AOL), the Brahms toolset is intended to develop and simulate multi-agent models of human and machine behavior. In agent-oriented programming agents have autonomous behavior, and are able to act independently based on a "local" worldview (i.e. their beliefs about the world). Multi-agent systems (MAS) are composed of multiple interacting agents and can be used to solve problems that are difficult or impossible for an individual agent or monolithic system to solve. Using this capability, Brahms enables a "from simulation to implementation" software engineering methodology, in which a multi-agent simulation of people's work practice is turned into a multi-agent workflow system that automates part of the process and integrates seamlessly with existing work practices.
During the OCAMS development process, computer scientists in the Work Systems Design & Evaluation Group of the Intelligent Systems Division at NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) studied and simulated OCA work practices (which include responsibility for manually uplinking and downlinking all files to and from the ISS, e.g. schedules, procedures, commands, email, photographs, health data, newspapers, etc) in collaboration with the OCA team to identify possible process improvements. Using statistics generated from the Brahms simulation model, the team designed and simulated an agent-based workflow system automating the process of creating a ground-based replica of the ISS file system (the MirrorLAN). Simulation statistics predicted a reduction in mirroring time from 6% to 0.6% of the OCA Officer's shift -- a 90% reduction. Using the Simulation-to-Implementation engineering method, Brahms agents were then converted to the OCAMS run-time tool. Using the Brahms Virtual Machine, these agents manage the workflow on multiple computers and servers using secure communications provided by the Brahms Collaborative Infrastructure. The tool also automatically writes large parts of the OCA Handover Log.
About Maarten Sierhuis
Dr. Maarten Sierhuis is a Senior Scientist at RIACS with a Ph.D. in social science informatics from the University of Amsterdam in The Netherlands, and an informatics engineering degree from the Polytechnic University in the Hague. In keeping with his belief that technology designers need a deep understanding of how people work in practice, before they even attempt to develop technology for people, Dr. Sierhuis' research over the last 15 years has focused on computational modeling and simulation techniques for understanding how people work ("work practice modeling and simulation"). This work is aimed at providing software developers with a better understanding of the practice and context in which work occurs and better equipping them to assist people and enhance their work lives.
Dr. Sierhuis is the Principal Investigator for the development of Brahms and Co-Principal Investigator for the Brahms project in the Work Systems Design & Evaluation Group part of the Collaborative Assistant Systems organization, Computational Sciences Division (Code-IC), ARC.
About RIACS
The Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science (RIACS) is focused on developing the next generation enabling technologies that will facilitate both human and robotic space exploration. Since its inception in 1983, the Institute has conducted basic and applied computer science research across a variety of aerospace-related disciplines, including supercomputing, computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, high-performance networking, and artificial intelligence.
About USRA
The Universities Space Research Association, established in 1969 by the National Academy of Sciences, is a private, nonprofit consortium of 102 universities offering advanced degrees in space- and aeronautics-related disciplines. USRA's mission is to conduct leading-edge research, develop innovative technologies, promote education and policy across the breadth of space science, and operate premier science and technology facilities by involving universities, private industry and government.
