Autonomous Performance Monitoring System: Monitoring and Self-Tuning (MAST)

Maintaining the long-term performance of software onboard a spacecraft can be a major factor in the cost of operations. In particular, the task of controlling and maintaining a future mission of distributed spacecraft will undoubtedly pose a great challenge, since the complexity of multiple spacecraft flying in formation grows rapidly as the number of spacecraft in the formation increases. Eventually, new approaches will be required in developing viable control systems that can handle the complexity of the data and that are flexible, reliable and efficient. In this paper we propose a methodology that aims to maintain the accuracy of flight software, while reducing the computational complexity of software tuning tasks. The proposed Monitoring and Self-Tuning (MAST) method consists of two parts: a flight software monitoring algorithm and a tuning algorithm. The dependency on the software being monitored is mostly contained in the monitoring process, while the tuning process is a generic algorithm independent of the detailed knowledge on the software. This architecture will enable MAST to be applicable to different onboard software controlling various dynamics of the spacecraft, such as attitude self-calibration, and formation control. An advantage of MAST over conventional techniques such as filter or batch least square is that the tuning algorithm uses machine learning approach to handle uncertainty in the problem domain, resulting in reducing over all computational complexity. The underlying concept of this technique is a reinforcement learning scheme based on cumulative probability generated by the historical performance of the system. The success of MAST will depend heavily on the reinforcement scheme used in the tuning algorithm, which guarantees the tuning solutions exist.