Business Modelling for Robot Mission Control

This paper presents a paradigm for the organizational design of complex robotics missions. A mission with important strategic goals and involving a large number of technological resources and different decision levels, such as complex robotics based missions, can be modelled as an organization. To avoid compromising the strategic goals, organizations modelling principles must account for the management of any crisis situations. Therefore, the mission model may have to be redesigned along the execution of the mission. This amounts to a dynamic reorganization of the mission model. The proposed paradigm is supported on a business modelling framework to design a mission reference model, on a set of performance measures defining a set of crisis classes, and on a strategic plan that defines how the mission model is modified at a crisis situation. The proposed paradigm is exemplified in a simplified version of the Mars Pathfinder mission, using, exclusively, public domain data.