The Air Force Satellite Control Network (AFSCN) coordinates hundreds of satellite communication requests from various users every day. Building a conflict-free schedule from a large set of satellite communication requests is a difficult problem. Human schedulers are very adept at generating high-quality solutions, usually allowing all requests to be serviced. However, this process is time-intensive and requires highly trained, experienced individuals. That is, the teams of highly trained and experienced schedulers must manually check every schedule request received. Approximately half of all requests require adjustment to remove conflicts. The US Air Force (USAF) had an interest in further automating this process. Stottler Henke worked with the USAF to develop the Managed Intelligent Deconfliction and Scheduling (MIDAS) solution, an artificial intelligence (AI) tool for automatically scheduling satellite contacts, by incorporating the experience, insights, and expertise of human schedulers. MIDAS can now automate virtually all the scheduling of the satellite communication requests for the AFSCN, allowing schedulers to apply their expertise where it is really needed. MIDAS accomplishes this with a two-stage process that first shuffles tasks within their defined constraints before carefully applying a user-definable set of business rules that allow certain constraints to be relaxed when necessary. The system provides a familiar, user-friendly interface modeled on legacy Electronic Schedule Dissemination (ESD) systems to facilitate comparison and to allow users to switch from one interface to the other with relative ease. It runs on inexpensive consumer hardware and communicates with legacy systems via a well-defined plain-text file format: raw scheduling requests are imported to MIDAS, and scheduling results can be exported back to legacy tools. MIDAS now provides Air Force planning at a level not previously possible. A viable schedule can be assembled in a matter of minutes in order to assess the impact of possible outages, events, expansion of equipment, etc., that is, MIDAS provides the ability to perform “what-if” scenarios to assess the impact of a potential event or mission change. With only a few minutes of processing, MIDAS is able to deconflict all or virtually all communications requests for a given day. MIDAS has eliminated much of the repetitive work involved in scheduling and allows schedulers to focus on other important problems. This paper provides a history of MIDAS, an overview of its architecture and the many benefits MIDAS provides; in addition to its general applicability to non-USAF satellite communications scheduling.


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    Title :

    Managed intelligent deconfliction and scheduling for satellite communication


    Contributors:


    Publication date :

    2018-03-01


    Size :

    1718249 byte




    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English




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