Three tier architecture for controlling space life support systems

Managing life support for remote facilities requires maintaining environmental conditions beneficial to humans and plants, and managing resources like water, product gases, and food. Appropriate allocation and coordination of these tasks among humans, robots, and life support systems is important for efficient operations. The need for operational flexibility and reactivity combined with the need to reduce crew workload and the high cost of failure to manage resources effectively suggests automating low level control tasks and assisting humans in strategic planning and resource management. The three tier (3T) layered architecture is well-suited for such automated control. The planner automates task coordination across subsystems contending for resources. The separation of deliberative tasks from reactive tasks enables appropriate human intervention in autonomous operations. At each tier, mechanisms are provided for flexible response to novel events. We demonstrated the effectiveness of 3T to control life support systems for NASA's Lunar/Mars Life Support Test Project.