Task Allocation in Teams for Launch and Range Operations

Abstract

NASA's operations include many teams of people who must do their own individual tasks and communicate about those tasks to other team members to accomplish team goals. Team tasks are crucial in the Range Operations at Kennedy Space Center (KSC). Future systems to support such tasks may include software agents to alleviate heavy workload or time pressure by performing some tasks currently allocated to human operators. MORSE (Multi-agent Operation Range Simulation Environment) is an environment for three team members, encompassing some of the challenges facing Range Operations at KSC. The team must monitor incursions (e.g., aircraft or boats) that have entered the exclusion zone, an area bounded by launch impact lines. The human team has at its disposal radars that allow the team members to see incursions in the areas covered by the radars, and interceptor vehicles that can be appointed to intercept incursions. Radars and interceptor vehicles are shared resources that team members must acquire through coordination with each other and utilize for the performance of the team task. The overall team objective is to effect a safe launch where no incursions are left within the impact lines at launch time and resource consumption over the course of the task is minimized. In our initial experiment with this simulation environment we are comparing teams in which team members either have exclusive control over a resource type or control over an operating region.