STOTTLER HENKE ASSOCIATES, INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: AF191-005

Description

The Air Force Satellite Control Network (AFSCN) is the DoD’s global network of antennas that supports 160+ Earth-orbiting satellites. In real-time, several events can occur which can have immediate impact on the schedule of satellite support execution, including vehicle emergencies, equipment failures, etc. So, a team of highly trained and highly skilled scheduling experts stands watch around the clock to manually adjust the schedule. Stottler Henke proposes to apply our highly commercially successful Aurora Intelligent Planning and Scheduling Framework to real-time, automatic, intelligent AFSCN rescheduling for the 22nd Space Operations Squadron (22 SOPS) to more quickly react to real-time changes and to handle upcoming far-larger numbers of supports. Building on the current Aurora-based, operational, non-real-time Automatic AFSCN Scheduler (called MIDAS), in Phase I, we will perform another iteration of knowledge elicitation, prototype development, and user demonstration and feedback/evaluation and Phase II system design. Phase II will consist of full-scale development, integration, testing, evaluation, and feedback. Our work has been de-risked by the existing (though non-real-time) MIDAS system and extensive previous conversations with AFSCN schedulers, and our current work developing the AFSCN C2 system, called MARS, and the fact that Aurora has been successfully customized to many similar and diverse domains.