Functional, physical, and organizational architectures of a fractionated space infrastructure for long-term earth observation missions

This article has presented the functional, physical, and organizational architectures of the fractionated space infrastructure, which is capable of supporting multiple EO payloads to perform a variety of observation missions. Those comprehensive architectures are prerequisite for further research on fractionated spacecraft, such as cluster operations. The functional architecture specifies that there are four resource components; i.e., HBD component, DRSC component, MDP component, and LVDS component, to enable the fractionated space infrastructure to support multiple EO payloads. The physical architecture is derived by means of AHP, and the winner architecture consists of four heterogeneous modules to host the aforementioned four resource components separately. The organizational architecture is designed in such a way that each module is modeled as an agent and the fractionated system is organized through three layers; namely, the planner, allocator, and local controllers. The planner belonging to the higher level layer decomposes abstract high-level goals into cooperative tasks that satisfy temporal and resources constraints. And then the allocator from the middleware layer assigns the generated tasks to each module, which in the end accomplishes the assigned tasks with the onboard controller that belongs to the lower level layer. From both the physical and organizational perspective, the developed space infrastructure is able to self-adapt, self-optimize, and self-configure to dynamic changes in various local environmental conditions, and therefore fulfills the nontraditional requirements of long-term EO missions.