Agent Based Modeling of Collaboration
and Work Practices Onboard the International Space Station
Alessandro Acquisti, Maarten Sierhuis, William J. Clancey, and Jeffrey M.
Bradshaw
acquisti@sims.berkeley.edu, msierfhuis@mail.arc.nasa.gov
The International Space Station is one the most complex
projects ever, with numerous interdependent constraints affecting productivity
and crew safety. This requires planning years before crew expeditions, and
the use of sophisticated scheduling tools. Human work practices, however,
are difficult to study and represent within traditional planning tools.
Expedition ship logs highlight recurring discrepancies between planned crew
activities and the reality of onboard life. In addition, scheduling constraints
make it hard to 'replan' onboard activities. The need emerges for tools able
to model the work activities of astronauts onboard the ISS and their interactions
with other humans and artificial agents onboard and on earth. We present
an agent-based model and simulation of the activities and work practices
of astronauts onboard the ISS. The model represents "a day in the life" of
the ISS crew and is developed in Brahms-an agent-oriented, activity-based
language used to model knowledge in situated action and learning in human
activities. Brahms links knowledge-based models of activities with
discrete-event simulation and a subsumption architecture. In Brahms, agents'
behaviors are organized into activities, inherited from groups. Activities
are located in time and space. In our model of the ISS work environment we
are able to consider issues like resource availability, human/system interaction,
both scheduled and unscheduled activities, and the emergence of work practices
aboard the ISS out of procedures developed by engineers and mission controllers.