Space Applications for Distributed Constraint Reasoning

A potential weakness of any research is its applicability to real problems, and it is often difficult to determine whether a particular application needs a particular technology. Space missions offer a wide variety of multiagent problem domains, but the technology needs of these missions vary. Techniques developed by research in Distributed Constraint Reasoning (DCR) employ representations that can be applied to distributed problems generally (in the same way that many problems can be represented as constraint satisfaction problems). We briefly describe how different motivations for operating spacecraft translate into different multiagent problems and research challenges for DCR.