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El desarrollo de nuevas misiones satelitales se enfrenta a un incremento en la complejidad del software a bordo. Las próximas generaciones de satélites pequeños deben habilitar la infraestructura para la implementación de algoritmos a bordo concurrentes y deterministas para la coordinación y el control de la misión. Las arquitecturas basadas en multi agentes son un nuevo enfoque de desarrollo adoptado en el campo de la ingeniería de software debido a su flexibilidad, escalabilidad y adaptabilidad a entornos operativos dinámicos. Este artículo describe el diseño y la implementación de un framework basado en sistemas multi-agentes para desarrollar aplicaciones para computadoras embebidos con recursos altamente limitados que son utilizadas en pequeñas misiones satelitales. Como resultado de la implementación de este framework, el esfuerzo de codificación del usuario para escribir aplicaciones complejas de software a bordo se reduce hasta en un 50% con un impacto mínimo en la carga de la CPU y la asignación de la memoria del programa. Los resultados obtenidos en esta investigación demuestran no solo la viabilidad del software basado en MAS para misiones de satélites pequeños, sino también su valor para lograr planeamientos agresivos.

Bus saturation is deemed as one of the primary causes of delays in the data propagation between spacecraft components. However, the conditions under which bus congestion can affect measurements variability were not well characterized before. This work presents a bus saturation model and a set of experiments to characterize the bus performance of satellite missions for different traffic load, data rate, and synchronization periods. The results showed an increase of measurements variance of up to 18% caused by bus saturation. Additionally, an algorithm was proposed to reduce data delay by controlling saturation on the communication channel at operational level.

In recent years space-science and exploration have become more accessible due to the popularization of the concept of CubeSats. CubeSats are being used as a result of their convenient size and weight requirements, allowing for target missions to be designed, developed, and launched with a significant reduction of costs compared to traditional space missions.  Furthermore, the development of target missions has become more intricate, forcing a shift in the traditional notion of using a centralized control architecture to a distributed architecture.  A distributed architecture tackles the problem of a possible functionality loss over the control unit. This paper describes the extension of capabilities of the Multi-Agent Systems Framework for Embedded Systems (MAES). This extension provides MAES framework with the ability to perform inter-platform communication, so now the control unit architecture can be broadened allowing agents from different platforms to interact and perform cooperatively different routines designed by the developer, so it is not limited to the capabilities of just one platform. Moreover, this paper shows the results of the experimental setup showing the precision of inter-platform message exchange and the relationship between the delay of the exchange of inter-platform messages and the number of agents that are simultaneously running on each platform.