Requirements for an Autonomous Control Architecture for Advanced Life Support Systems

This paper describes a series of life support control experiments at NASA Johnson Space Center and at Vanderbilt University. These experiments involved two distinct, layered control architectures; one used a modelbased approach and the other a procedural approach to control complex, distributed systems. Both sets of experiments produced good results, but it also brought out the strengths and weaknesses of the two underlying technologies. Our goal in this paper is to come up with the requirements for an integrated architecture for autonomous controller design that combines the best of the two approaches. This paper discusses a potential approach to this integration and the advantages it offers.