Expert system for scheduling simulation lab sessions

Implementation and results of an expert system used for scheduling session requests for the Systems Engineering Simulator (SES) laboratory at the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) are discussed. Weekly session requests are received from astronaut crew trainers, procedures developers, engineering assessment personnel, software developers, and various others who wish to access the computers, scene generators, and other simulation equipment available to them in the SES lab. The expert system under discussion is comprised of a data acquisition portion - two Pascal programs run on a personal computer - and a CLIPS program installed on a minicomputer. A brief introduction to the SES lab and its scheduling background is given. A general overview of the system is provided, followed by a detailed description of the constraint-reduction process and of the scheduler itself. Results from a ten-week trial period using this approach are discussed. Finally, a summary of the expert system's strengths and shortcomings are provided.