Design and implementation of intelligent decision making system to generate flight scenario automatically Seyyed Mehdi Dehghan Researcher Space Research Institute (SRI) Tehran, Iran smm.dehghan@gmail.com Seyyed Hadi Cheheltani Researcher Space Research Institute (SRI) Tehran, Iran hadicheheltani@gmail.com Ali Kiapasha Researcher Space Research Institute (SRI) Tehran, Iran Abstract— in this paper, a new structure of an autonomous system generating a valid flight scenario for a satellite is designed and implemented. The hypothetical mission of this satellite is imaging from any points which are specified by users and also acquiring a sequence of imaged from high priority points on earth like fires jungles or volcano. The main intelligent decision making system in the satellite has to generate flight scenario of a microsatellite by receiving longitude and latitude of each requested imaging point from the earth. In this article an introduction of intelligent systems and their architecture for a typical microsatellite, cooperation scenarios between ground stations and a satellite and their missions are investigated. Finally the proposed intelligent system architecture and implementation of each layer and their integration is discussed. To test this new developed architecture a proper test bench is designed too. One of the approaches is adding some degree of autonomy to OBC of a satellite. All goals that are mentioned for an intelligent system and expansion in autonomy lead to self-based decision making process. This onboard decision making process is helpful in those situations that are not previewed on earth therefore are not scheduled to be done by satellite. This facility helps the system to pass the unsafe situations and response to them in a best way. At least this aspect can reduce destructible side effects of sudden situations. Keywords- satellite autonomy, intelligent sysetm, planner- scheduler, software in the loop, flight scenario I. INTRODUCTION The greatest motives for future technologies in satellite control systems are low cost and less time consumable design and build cycle. The onboard autonomy is one of approaches to decrease the cost of new programs specially in satellite constellation. An autonomous space system has important features such as ignoring time consumable activities that must be done by human [1], cost reduction in operational levels, reliability enhancement by continuous system health monitoring, operational optimization by faster reaction and interrupt ignorance, system protection against system’s internal issues, compatible and reliable functionality in complex tasks. Autonomy in satellite is defined as a set of onboard activities and capabilities that is used to manage satellite and its payload automatically. Autonomy in satellite can be done by prolonged onboard planning and scheduling, remote command generation, onboard attitude determination and control, independent payload function, event-based functioning, separation in TT&C and mission control centers, telemetry data compression, goal based and onboard mission planning and scheduling, autonomous mission generation and autonomous fault detection, isolation and system recovery [2]. These mentioned features enable the onboard systems to decide precisely while confronting unexpected events. This type of system has automatic reaction capability to reduce or ignore effects of unexpected events in mission completion. Usually satellite controlling is done from mission control center. One of the tasks of this center is to generate a time sequence of satellite functionality. This time sequence is called timeline. One timeline can support days or hours of satellite functions. The obvious problem of this structure is the limitation on environmental changes. These changes can be internal like hardware malfunction of payload or be external like a goal point being camouflaged by a cloud during imaging task. To conquer these kinds of problems, the onboard autonomy structure uses a planner-scheduler. Since in autonomous system some routine tasks of non-autonomous systems are omitted, utilizing this system can reduce the complexity of mission control center. To monitor and track system functionality there is no need of a human operator, this operator just acts in unexpected or critical situations. For instance, the accurate analysis of telemetry data is done by a human operator. One of the other advantages of autonomous systems is the high ratio of useful data to all volume of data sent from or to the satellite. In non-automatic methods, most part of data that are sent to the satellite is software control statements while most part of data in autonomous methods is just mission data. Considering above mentioned advantages of using autonomy in satellites, designing autonomous systems are a high priority subjects of every space research centers [3]. The greatest challenge in design of this type of systems is developing a heuristic architecture that can be capable of conquering mission requirements simpler and more effective. These architectures are exactly against ground based architectures which are high cost and also having no permanent monitoring system can cause major failures in their lifetime. In this article, first an analytic discussion about 178 978-1-4244-9615-0/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE