Autonomous tools and techniques for reducing operational and maintenance costs in space planes

Our objective is to provide a collection of automated tools and techniques for reducing operational and maintenance costs in space planes. To demonstrate our capability, we used the AFE of JPL which will be flown on the X-33 as the testbed to examine our techniques. This paper discusses the tools that were used to develop that software. Another paper is in preparation to discuss the artificial intelligence being flown on the AFE. One of the technology demonstrations on the AFE was to show how artificial intelligence could be used for reducing operational and maintenance costs. For this we used two JPL developed tools: Tspec and SHINE. Tspec was used for the automated testing and verification of portions of the AFE´s software. SHINE was used as a high-speed inference engine for monitoring, analysis and diagnosis of portions of the AFE hardware. Faults are detected and diagnosed in flight with their resolutions logged by the X-33´s. This paper provides an overview of SHINE. A description of Tspec can be found from the references