On autonomous software architectures for distributed spacecraft: A Local-Global Policy

New trends such as satellite swarms or fractionated spacecraft have experienced a very significant growth in the last decade. Migration from monolithic satellite architectures to new mission architectures involving large constellations of collaborative spacecraft is enabled by several hardware technologies and the application of modularity-driven designs, and presents numerous benefits such as low development costs and times and high flexibility. This has forced the exploration of new techniques and designs which have been often tackled from the hardware perspective but scarcely approached from the software architecture standpoint. This paper presents an autonomous software architecture and a management policy targeted for the broad range of distributed architecture missions. The paper presents the Local-Global approach, an adaptive management policy based on the collaboration between two levels of control which is aimed at enabling distributed mission control in dynamic and changing environments with limited computational capabilities. The Local- Global policy establishes the behaviouralmodel of a systemcomposed of a master scheduler and an arbitrary number of local schedulers, and describes the parameters that can be adjusted to reduce the amount of information processed by the master node which makes it suitable for different distributed spacecraft architectures.