Autonomous Spacecraft Resource Management: A Multi-agent Approach

  • Authors:
  • N. D. Monekosso;Paolo Remagnino

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • AI*IA '99 Proceedings of the 6th Congress of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence on Advances in Artificial Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

The paper presents a multi-agent system that learns to manage the re-sources of an unmanned spacecraft. Each agent controls a sub-system and learns to optimise its resources. The agents can coordinate their actions to satisfy user requests. Co-ordination is achieved by exchanging sched-uling information between agents. Resource management is implemented using two reinforcement learning techniques: the Monte-carlo and the Q-learning. The paper demonstrates how the approach can be used to model the imaging system of a spacecraft. The environment is represented by agents which control the spacecraft sub-systems involved in the imaging activity. The agent in charge of the resource management senses the information regarding the resource requested, the resource conflicts and the resource availability. Scheduling of resources is learnt when all subsystems are fully functional and when resources are reduced by random failures.