On 9 june 2017, Jonathan Bonnet became IRT Saint Exupéry’s 2nd PhD student to defend his PhD dissertation. Awarded by University of Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier, his work was supervised by both IRIT laboratory[1] (CNRS/INPT/UT3 Paul Sabatier/UT1 Capitol/UT2 Jean-Jaurès) and IRT Saint Exupéry.
The high quality and the relevance of Jonathan’s thesis contributed to get significant results as a part of OCE project.
THESIS SUBJECT
Dynamic planning, multi-objectives and multi-criteria by a self-adaptative multi-agent system.
Application to constellations of observation satellites
About this thesis
Building the best plan in product treatment, the best schedule to a building construction or the best route for a salesman in order to visit a maximum of cities in the time allowed while taking into account different constraints (economic, temporal, humans or meteorological): in all of those variety of applications, optimizing the planning is a complex task including a huge number of heterogeneous entities in interaction, the strong dynamics, multiple contradictory objectives, etc
Mission planning for constellations of satellites is a major example: a lot of parameters and constraints, often antagonists must be integrated, leading to an important combinatorial search space. Currently, in Europe, plans are built on ground, just before the satellite is visible by the ground stations. Any request coming during the planning process must wait for the next period. Moreover, the complexity of this problem grows drastically: the number of constellations and satellites increases, as the number of daily requests. Current approaches have shown their limits. To overcome those drawbacks, new systems based on decentralization and distribution inherent to this problem, are needed.
The adaptive multi-agent systems (AMAS) theory and especially the AMAS4Opt (AMAS For Optimization) model have shown their adequacy in complex optimization problems solving. The local and cooperative behavior of agents allows the system to self-adapt to highly dynamic environments and to quickly deliver adequate solutions.
In this thesis, we focus on solving mission planning for satellite constellations using AMAS. Thus, we propose several enhancement for the agent models proposed by AMAS4Opt. Then, we design the ATLAS dynamic mission planning system. To validate ATLAS on several criteria, we rely on huge sets of heterogeneous data. Finally, this work is compared to an operational and standard system on real scenarios, highlighting the value of our system.
OCE PROJECT
Technologies for optimizing the end-to-end performance of Earth Observation space systems (smart programming of constellations, onboard and ground autonomous processing, ground infrastructures for big data processing).
Jury
- Mrs Marie-Pierre GLEIZES, Paul Sabatier University – PhD Advisor
- Mrs Elsy KADDOUM, Toulouse-Jean-Jaurès University – PhD Co-Advisor
- Mr Serge RAINJONNEAU, IRT Saint Exupéry – Thales Alenia Space – PhD Co-Advisor
- Mr Flavien BALBO, École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne – Rapporteur
- Mr Abderrafia KOUKAM, Belfort-Montbéliard University – Rapporteur
- Mrs Virginie GABREL, LAMSADE Paris Dauphine University – Examiner
- Mr Grégory FLANDIN, IRT Saint Exupéry – Airbus DS – Invited
PUBLICATIONS
Bonnet, M.-P. Gleizes, E. Kaddoum and S. Rainjonneau:“ATLAS : Planification multi-satellite dynamique et temps réel”.RIA (Revue d’Intelligence Artificielle) (2016)
Bonnet, M.-P. Gleizes, E. Kaddoum and S. Rainjonneau:“Planification de missions multi-satellites par système multi-agent coopératif”.JFSMA’15 (23es Journées Francophones sur les Systèmes Multi-Agents), Rennes (France). 2015
Bonnet, M.-P. Gleizes, E. Kaddoum, S. Rainjonneau and G. Flandin:“A Self-Adaptive Multi-Agent System to Self-Organize Satellite Planning”.SASO (IEEE 9th International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems), Cambridge (MA – USA). 2015
Bonnet, M.-P. Gleizes, E. Kaddoum and S. Rainjonneau:“Rapid and adaptative mission planner for multi-satellite missions using a self-adaptative multi-agent system”.IAC (67th International Astronautical Congress), Guadalajara (Mexico). 2016
[1] SMAC Team – Systèmes Multi-Agents Coopératifs