Autonomous Control Method for Material Circulation in Advanced Life Support System

An Advanced Life Support System (ALS) conducts recycling and circulation of materials within the system, and is the component ensuring the survival of living beings during missions. The present research examines schemes for recycling the elements carbon, hydrogen and oxygen inside a system to process wastes and produce food. The circulations of materials become very complicated in this kind of ALS, so it is difficult to manually draw up comprehensive control principles. It is also difficult to handle emergency conditions. Therefore, it would be preferable to carry out environmental control automatically, and to provide for autonomous handling when an emergency arises. We applied methods for automatically creating schedules in an attempt to enable the system to continue degenerate operation automatically during emergencies; one control method employed multi-agent reinforcement learning, and the other employed Lagrangian decomposition and coordination method. The two procedures were found to offer complementary advantages and weaknesses. A system was then proposed under which the two procedures would compensate for each other’s weaknesses.