Swarm intelligence, a Blackboard architecture and local decision making for spacecraft command

Control of a multi-spacecraft constellation is a topic of significant inquiry, at present. This paper presents and evaluates a command architecture for a multi-spacecraft mission. It combines swarm techniques with a decentralized / local decision making architecture (which uses a set of shared blackboards for coordination) and demonstrates the efficacy of this approach. Under this approach, the Blackboard software architecture is used to facilitate data sharing between craft as part of a resilient hierarchy and the swarm techniques are used to coordinate activity. The paper begins with an overview of prior work on the precursor command technologies and then presents five command architectures for comparison purposes. Then, it presents a qualitative analysis of these techniques, followed by a quantitative analysis which characterizes the constellation´s performance across a variety of prospective scenarios including normal operations, several mission scenarios which limit communications, operations in an intentionally communications-denied environment and operations across a variety of craft failure scenarios. From performance analysis, the utility of the techniques is analyzed.