Project Title:

A "Diet Expert Subsystem" Program for the Controlled Ecological Life Support System

12.04-6780
A "Diet Expert Subsystem" Program for the  Controlled Ecological Life Support System
Applied Sciences Consultants
621 River Oaks Parkway
San Jose
CA
95134
Ahmed
Waleh
(408-434-6780)
ARC

Abstract:

Regenerative life support systems require reliable, stable means for recycling biological
residues and regenerating the life-sustaining elements within a closed habitat. Prominent
issues are dynamic control and prevention of instabilities caused by chaotic system
behavior. An important, but unexplored, control problem in the Controlled Ecological
Life Support System (CELSS) program is in meeting the crew's dietary needs considering
both the overall system stability and subsystem instabilities that could become a
health threat. Dietary planning, therefore, involves more than an optimization of
food-values and requires a well-characterized expert subsystem that can be integrated
with other subsystems of a "closed ecosystem."
Phase I will define an expert computer program that, if successful, can interface
with other CELSS subsystems and determine, schedule, modify, control, and project
both the daily and overall dietary needs according to a set of acquired rules from
a cumulative data base. This expert system is a program that attempts to simulate
the reasoning of a human expert given the same set of conditions.

Potential Commercial Application:

Potential Commercial Applications:  This project's results could be integrated into
the CELSS for extended space missions.