Integrating human performance measures into space operations: Beyond our scheduling capabilities?

Abstract

Current planning and scheduling software tools for International Space Station (ISS) support different flight controller teams as they plan daily space operations. Planning and scheduling tools capabilities include integrating digitized ISS state inputs, evaluating their expected future states, and propagating them over time. Extensive, custom-made computational models of operations, of objectives, and of operational constraints help ISS flight controllers identify where scheduled events violate constraints. Based on the current capabilities of these tools, this paper proposes how human performance measures could be better integrated into planning and scheduling tools for space mission operations. Future integration of human performance measures could be applied to state inputs (in this case, the astronaut's state) and to modeling human performance operational constraints & operational objectives (i.e., assigned activities) with parameters that are relevant to human performance measures. Gaps between the state-of-the-art for human performance modeling and planning tools for future exploration missions are identified.

Increasing crew autonomy for long duration exploration missions: Self-scheduling

“…For example, a temporal constraint might be that biological samples require time to process; therefore subsequent steps must wait a certain amount of time before they can take place. With the variety of ISS experiments and the limited resources onboard (e.g., crew time, power, video channels), maintaining awareness of all the different types of procedure constraints is a fulltime job typically handled by the OPS PLAN [10]. Since astronauts are not expected to have the operational knowledge held by dozens of individuals in mission control, Playbook provides no-go zones, grayed-out areas on the timeline that indicate where certain activities cannot be scheduled due to an existing constraint ( Figure 3).…”