The mission operations directorate (MOD) at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) is responsible for the planning and operation of human space flight missions. MOD is being challenged with sustaining and developing new operations capabilities to support increasingly demanding requirements and to improve its processes to accomplish these missions at higher levels of safety, mission success, and effectiveness. Automation is being considered as an enabling technology to meet the aforementioned challenges. The synergistic combination of flight controllers and intelligent software providing the function of 'operations assistants' (OA) is being pursued as the key implementation of this technology in the Mission Control Center (MCC).The flight control team (FCT) assesses the condition and operability of the major systems such as electrical power, thermal control, life support, communications, altitude control, and data handling at MCC. OA assist the flight controllers with their tasks of monitoring the status and health of the flight systems. They also help maintain the flight controller's awareness of the operations being performed during the mission and help assure that operational objectives are being met. The station duty officer (SDO) performs the lead operations role for the International Space Station (ISS) during quiescent times when FCT and the flight director are off-duty. SDOs assess the condition and operability of the major ISS systems. This assessment involves monitoring and controlling several periodic processes on systems such as the electrical power, thermal control, life support, communications, altitude control, and data handling systems. The SDO is also responsible for coordinating operations with the Russian FCT. The OA will help the SDO maintain an awareness of all the processes performed on board and will assist with the responses to anomalous conditions. The OA for this position will support the concept of reduced control center staffing during quiescent times. The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to present a unique two-stage specification methodology that combines data flow diagrams and petri nets and (2) to apply the proposed methodology in a complex space station system. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

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The manned space program is facing many challenges due to the nature of current and future programs. Automation in the form of Operations Assistants is being pursued as a solution to some of these challenges. This paper describes the nature of the challenges and NASA / Johnson Space Center's approach to meeting these challenges. This includes a description of the initial phase of the Operations Assistant project and the presentation of a staged approach to incorporating intelligent agents. Mission control Center (MCC) (figure 1).

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