Intelligent Systems Branch Johnson Space Center Engineering Directorate Automation, Robotics and Simulation Division Commentary on: A Mathematical Programming Algorithm for Planning and Scheduling an Earth Observing SAR Constellation David Kortenkamp NASA Johnson Space Center TRACLabs Inc. Houston TX

Intelligent Systems Branch Johnson Space Center Engineering Directorate Automation, Robotics and Simulation Division Pushing the assumptions Assumption of independent and homogeneous satellites –What if we have two or more satellites with different sensors that need to train on a specific location at the same time (or at a linked time)? –Can two satellites share a node (a Data Take Opportunity) in a graph? –How does this affect the algorithm?

Intelligent Systems Branch Johnson Space Center Engineering Directorate Automation, Robotics and Simulation Division Robotics Planetary exploration robots have similar problems – e.g., they need to optimize their visits of a specific number of objects Many techniques have been developed for robots over the years Could this work be extended to the robotic domain? What advantages would it have over other approaches?

Intelligent Systems Branch Johnson Space Center Engineering Directorate Automation, Robotics and Simulation Division Activity scheduling Crew scheduling is currently a very manual process Can we represent crew members as commodities (nodes) and their tasks as arcs? Then time, skills, communication with ground, etc. all become constraints on the arcs. Do the algorithms in this paper support such an approach?