A New Approach for Advanced Life-Support Systems Control -III

The proposed MAS is organized in a layered
structure. In the first layer, agents will be in
charge of the planning and coordination of
necessary tasks and interaction with the crew,
requiring their intervention only when
mandatory. The use of Expert Systems in this
layer will allow actions to be planned in a systematic
and efficient manner. For example,
achieving an optimal harvest depends not
only on the maturity of the crop but also on
food requirements and storage capability.
In the second layer, agents will control
the execution of these tasks, interfacing
with the sensors and actuators of each
LSS subsystem and notifying relevant
process data, progress information or
unexpected events to the planner layer.
This layer will be heterogeneous in the
sense of implementation, but for each
process control an agent will be on top,
permitting a standard communication
with the rest of the system.
An especially critical problem to be
solved is the amount of supervisory
information that this system will generate.
Agents specializing in information
synthesis are needed to process this
information before communicating it to
the crew. Automated supervision of the
processes will be required, providing
only relevant information and requiring
crew attention only when mandatory.