Increasing crew autonomy for long duration exploration missions: Self-scheduling

Over the last three years, we have been investigating the operational concept of crew self-scheduling as a method of increasing crew autonomy for future exploration missions. Through Playbook, a planning and scheduling software tool, we have incrementally enabled the capability for Earth analog mission crews to modify their schedules at various levels of complexity. Playbook allows the crew to create new activities from scratch, add activities or groups of activities from a Task List, and reschedule or reassign flexible activities. The crew is also able to identify if plan modifications create violations, i.e., plan constraints not being met. This paper summarizes our observations with qualitative evidence from four NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) analog missions that supported self-scheduling as a feasible operational concept.