NASA's OCA Mirroring System An application of multiagent systems in Mission Control

NASA's ISS MCC is charged with managing, commanding and controlling every aspect of the ISS, from docking with the Space Shuttle and Soyuz spacecrafts to uplinking and downlinking all information to and from the ISS. The ISS MCC, as most MCCs, is divided into a "front room"—the room where the main flight controllers are located—and a "back room"—where the support flight controllers are located. Each flight controller in the front room has several support flight controllers in the back room. Together the people in the front- and back room are organized in flight control groups for the different subsystems for the ISS, overall named the Flight Control Team (FCT). The Orbital Communications Adapter (OCA) officer is a back room flight controller and a member of the Operations Planner (OPSPLAN) group. The ISS OCA Officer is responsible for manually uplinking and downlinking all files to and from the ISS. These files include schedules, procedures, commands, email, photographs, health data, newspapers, etc. Over a six-month period, computer scientists and ethnographers in the Work Systems Design & Evaluation Group of the Intelligent Systems Division at NASA Ames studied and simulated OCA work practices in collaboration with the OCA team to identify possible process improvements. Using statistics generated from an agent-based simulation model, the team, over the next three- month period, designed and simulated an agent-based workflow system that automates the process of creating a ground-based replica of the ISS file system (the Mirror LAN). Simulation statistics predicted a reduction in mirroring time from 6.7% to 0.4% of the OCA Officer's shift—a more than 94% reduction.