Open Source Software for Simulating Collaborative Networks of Autonomous Adaptive Sensors

Collaborative networks of small satellites will form future Earth-observing systems. Maximizing the science value of measurements from such systems will require autonomous decision making with regard to management of limited resources (i.e. power, communications, and sensor configuration). The complexity of this decision space warrants the creation of software tools to aid users in efficient modeling and simulation of collaborative remote sensing networks. In this paper, we present a new open-source software library and tool–set that has been specifically designed for simulating such networks. Details of the object-oriented C++ library are presented with results from example simulations to confirm that it is able to address this challenge. The software tools developed offer enhanced simulation capabilities to developers of future observing system simulation experiments (OSSEs) with collaborative networks of adaptive sensor platforms.