Activity Planning with Resources for the Exploration of Space (APRES)

About this technology

Overview

Activity Planning with Resources for the Exploration of Space (APRES) is a mixed-initiative mission planning system for ground operations. APRES has a web-based user interface that is integrated with the Open-source Mission Control Technologies (OpenMCT) system and includes a plan editor, a timeline plan display, a temporal constraint editor, display of the state and numeric chronicles, and a mixed-initiative violation resolution manager. Automation support is supplied by the APRES Service, which includes components that provide the following capabilities:(1) plan simulation, which determines the state and numeric chronicles (values of the model variables over time) and determines when "processes" are triggered and terminated based on world states in the execution trace, (2) violation detection of constraints and flight rules encoded in the domain model, as well as of user-created temporal constraints, (3) violation resolution suggestions as to how to fix the plan's violations. The user controls when and how to utilize the automation support.The APRES Service components are based on the Action Notation Modeling Language (ANML) which is a highly expressive, powerful language for specification of domain models. ANML enables the specification of an extensive variety of flight rules and resource usage (e.g., one can represent continuous effects). In addition to action definitions, ANML models can include definitions of "processes", which are not under the control of the agent or human planner, e.g., the operation of a survival heater that is powered on and off based on the current temperature. Integrated with the APRES system is a web-based ANML Editor for creating, editing, and debugging domain models. The ANML Editor interacts with the ANML Parser to detect errors and interacts with the APRES Data Store for file management.