Laying a Foundation for Software Engineering of Knowledge Bases in Spacecraft Ground Systems

In spacecraft telemetry expert systems technology is being used to manage the complexity generated by the increasing number of complex measurands. However, an uncontrolled proliferation of rules in an expert system can lead to maintenance and management problems of the system. A semi-automated tool, such as Pragati’s MVP-CA (Multi-ViewPoint Clustering Analysis) tool, can provide a valuable aid for comprehension, maintenance, verification, validation, integration and evolution of these expert systems by structuring a large knowledge base in various meaningful ways. The MVP-CA tool mines the knowledge existent in telemetry rule bases by exploiting the similarity across rules. This knowledge can serve as a handle to verify and validate the knowledge in the existing system as well as to formulate new rule sets for future mission planning activities.