A priority assessment multi-criteria decision model for human spaceflight mission planning at NASA

Abstract

Analog missions are real-life, Earth-based science missions whose purpose is to help understand the operations, techniques, and technologies required to perform similar tasks during future human spaceflight missions. The goal of performing an analog mission is to prepare crewmembers and support teams for future space missions in a low risk, low-cost environment. Vehicle, habitat, and surface terrain simulators are used to test hardware, operations, and tasks repeatedly for analog missions. This study presents a multi-criteria decision making model that was developed for the Integrated Human Exploration Mission Simulation Facility project at Johnson Space Center to assess the priority of a set of human spaceflight mission simulators. The proposed framework integrates subjective judgments derived from the analytic hierarchy process with entropy data into a preference model to prioritize five mission simulators for the human exploration of Mars.

Keywords:

• analytic hierarchy process
• entropy
• multi-criteria decision making
• human spaceflight
• NASA

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by NASA Grant number NAG 9-1526. I am grateful to Jack Knight, Steven Gonzales, Anthony Bruins, Terry Tri, Gretchen Thomas, John Park, Kevin Wells, Lac Nguyen, and the INTEGRITY Team, all from the Johnson Space Center, and my colleagues Dennis Kennedy and Jack Rappaport for their assistance with this research project.