While NASA is increasingly interested in multi-platform space missions, controlling such platforms via timed command sequences -the current favored operations technique -is unfortunately very difficult, and a key source of this complexity involves resolving conflicts to coordinate multiple spacecraft plans. We propose distributed constraint satisfaction (DCSP) techniques for automated coordination and conflict resolution of such multi-spacecraft plans. We introduce novel value ordering heuristics in DCSP to significantly improve the rate of conflict resolution convergence to meet the efficiency needs of multispacecraft missions. In addition, we introduce distributed POMDP (partially observable markov decision process) based techniques for DCSP convergence analysis, which facilitates automated selection of the most appropriate DCSP strategy for a given situation, and points the way to a new generation of analytical tools for analysis of DCSP and multi-agent systems in general.
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