Simulating Advanced Life Support Systems for Integrated Controls Research

This paper describes a simulation of an integrated advanced life support system. It contains models of the major components of an Advanced Life Support (ALS) system including crew, biomass, water recovery, air revitalization, food processing and power supply. The simulation also models malfunctions and stochastic processes. Sensors and actuators are modeled to allow controllers to interact with the simulation. The simulation is designed for testing and evaluation of life support control approaches. We use an example of a simple genetic algorithm to demonstrate how a control application might use the simulation. The simulation is implemented in Java to make it portable and easy to use.