Requirements for an Autonomous Control Architecture for Advanced Life Support Systems

This paper builds upon a series of life support control experiments conducted at NASA Johnson Space Center and at Vanderbilt University. The experiments used two distinct, layered control architectures: (i) a model-based approach, and (ii) a procedural approach to control complex, distributed systems. Both sets of experiments produced good results, but they also brought out the strengths and weaknesses of the two in the context of requirements for long duration human missions. Our goal in this paper is to come up with the design requirements for an integrated architecture for autonomous controller design that combines the best of the two approaches. This paper provides a framework for integrated design and discusses the advantages it offers.