Fault Management Architecture for Distributed Systems

An effective fault management design is a critical necessity for long term sustainable missions for spacecraft, especially those that are built for full or significant levels of autonomy. The design of such autonomous spacecraft has evolved and has now become increasingly complex with multiple interacting modules, developed by different manufacturers, working in close coordination to achieve the mission objectives. Given the complex nature of current missions and spacecraft, an effective distributed onboard fault management system is pivotal to preempting failures, ensuring operational integrity, and sustaining the safety of space missions where real-time human oversight and intervention is either severely limited or not feasible. Qualtech Systems, Inc. (QSI) through this proposed effort plans to address the above fault management challenges. QSI proposes to develop and evaluate potential fault management architectures that leverage QSI’s TEAMS causal models and reasoning engines that can work effectively in a distributed decision-making system and evaluate them for a select set of currently planned NASA missions with the aforementioned distributed system architecture needs.
Benefits: The proposed technology is aimed at facilitating effective usage of model-based systems engineering for improving fault tolerance and mitigation response capability during design, and the concomitant software tool for supporting its implementation, will allow NASA to better design, plan and execute future Space Missions. The proposed technology is positioned for direct applications for NASA missions that deploy complex modules and equipment such as the Lunar Gateway and its different modules, Orion, the Human Landing System, Europa Clipper, swarm-based atmospheric missions such as the HelioSwarm, and rovers such as the VIPER. We envisage the proposed technology to be of significant interest for DoD’s Mission planning and Rapid design of space missions/satellites where model-based design processes will be used for supporting infrastructure Space services capabilities. QSI is currently working with the Army for fault management design and operations of the Remote Combat Vehicle (RCV) and plan to apply this technology for that effort.