A Theory of Vehicle Management Systems

With the increasing capability of computers, engineers have designed vehicles to perform ever more complex tasks. Whether fully automated, as with robotic space probes, or partially automated in conjunction with a crew, vehicles have become both more complex and more capable. To manage this complexity, designers have developed increasingly sophisticated vehicle management systems (VMS) to manage vehicle internal states, and to operate in its external environment. While often effective, design of VMSs has often been on an ad hoc basis. Using insights from information theory, complexity theory, and artificial intelligence, this paper develops a theoretical framework in which to understand the nature of VMSs. The theory defines the interaction of VMS functions and provides a mathematical formulation to assess the complexity of different VMS configurations.