A mission management system architecture for cooperating air vehicles

A mission management system comprises the processes that perform tactical decision making tasks for an unmanned vehicle system. As such, it is the primary determinant of the range of realizable behaviors, versatility and ultimately the operational effectiveness of any class of Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs). The Mission Management System (MMS) project is an on-going program to develop a unified system architecture to provide ground-based and in-flight mission management for a reconfigurable class of cooperating UAVs. This distributed architecture enables integrated automated and manual planning to be applied to a hierarchy of operational levels, from the entire theater to individual vehicles. This paper presents an overview of the MMS motivations, requirements, and architectural design. A local MMS node, present at every cooperating site, manager the local platform resources and provides reaction capabilities m well as intelligent planning for “optimal” responses. Each node is an independent agent in the cooperation and negotiation process, using an interaction model analogous to a team of cooperating humane. The MMS design approach combines object-oriented analysis and design with rapid application development. Each node is layered defining “virtual machines” which provide standardized interfaces to promote reuse, flexibility, sad simplified development and maintenance. The architecture has been used to demonstrate both a ground-based planning prototype for unmanned missiles and a simulation of several cooperating UAVs