Programming Language for Automated Scheduling and Planning

The ASPEN Modeling Language (AML) has been developed for use in the Automated Scheduling and Planning Environment (ASPEN) software system. As described in prior NASA Tech Briefs articles, ASPEN is an object-oriented system that contains a modular, reconfigurable, reusable set of components that implement the elements commonly found in complex automated-scheduling application programs. AML has a simple syntax that makes it easy for a user who lacks expertise in computer science and artificial intelligence to rapidly create a model of a spacecraft-operations domain for an ASPEN automated-scheduling application program. AML enables a user to construct a model, expressed as a plain-text file, that defines activities, resources, and states. A user can also modify a model without need to recompile ASPEN. AML encodes spacecraft operability constraints, flight rules, spacecraft hardware models, goals of scientific experiments, and operational procedures to enable the generation, by the automated-scheduling program, of low-level sequences of spacecraft operations.