Automating Deep Space Network scheduling and conflict resolution

Abstract

The Deep Space Network (DSN) is a central part of NASA's infrastructure for communicating with active space missions, from earth orbit to beyond the solar system. Consisting of more than a dozen major ground antennas at three sites spaced around the globe, it must be carefully scheduled to satisfy the requirements of the various mission users, subject to many constraints. Scheduling the communication services for these missions is a fairly large scale negotiation problem since each mission cannot give up control of its spacecraft. While we will give details of this problem, this paper focuses more on describing an agent that provides scheduling advice to a single user within a collaborative scheduling system being developed. This agent can provide guidance to the user about feasible and optimal solutions to the problem they are working on. We describe our recent work in modeling the complexities of user requirements, and then scheduling and resolving conflicts on that basis.