Autonomous planning system based on temporal constraint satisfaction

In order to realize spacecraft autonomy activity duration and complex temporal relations must be taken into consideration. In the space mission planning system, the traditional planners are unable to describe this knowledge, so an object-oriented temporal knowledge representation method is proposed to model every activity as an object to describe the activity duration, start-time, end-time and the temporal relations with other activities. The layered planning agent architecture is then designed for spacecraft autonomous operation, and the functions of every component are given. A planning algorithm based on the temporal constraint satisfaction is built by using this knowledge representation and system architecture. The prototype of deep space mission autonomous planning system is implemented. The results show that with the object-oriented temporal knowledge description method, the space mission planning system can be used to describe simultaneous activities, resource and temporal constraints, and a complete plan for exploration mission quickly under complex constraints is produced.