Towards a modular Nano-Satellite Software Platform: Prolog Constraint-based Scheduling and System Architecture
Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Abstract: [ANGLÈS] During the last decade, many universities, research centers and private companies have started developing their miniature satellites. These small spacecraft, advantageous in terms of development-costs and -times, have been enabled by the miniaturization of several hardware technologies (embedded systems, COTS components) and the application of modularity-driven designs. However, this effort has been mainly focused on the hardware architecture but scarcely approached from the software architecture perspective. The purpose of this thesis is twofold. On the one hand, this work focuses on the software aspects of nano-satellites through the analysis of software architectures implemented in current nano-satellite missions. Such analysis allowed the generation of an evaluation framework which encompasses five quality attributes and which is targeted for these particular kinds of space systems. The result of this preliminary study converged in the definition of a set of design criteria that have been applied in the development of the general-purpose nano-satellite software architecture presented in this dissertation. One the other hand, this work consisted in the design and implementation of a core component in satellite autonomy systems: a task scheduler. Entirely written in Prolog and using constrain programming paradigm, this work details the development and test of a multi-resource fully-elastic priority-based task scheduler which has been integrated within the nano-satellite software architecture and which allows to operate the spacecraft with minimum human intervention.
Author: Carles Araguz
Language: English
Subfield: Aerospace Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W91990496