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At least 307 records · Page 17

Architecture for a 1-GHz Digital RADAR

An architecture for a Direct RF-digitization Type Digital Mode RADAR was developed at GSFC in 2008. Two variations of a basic architecture were developed for use on RADAR imaging missions using aircraft and spacecraft. Both systems can operate with a pulse repetition rate up to 10 MHz with 8 received RF samples per pulse repetition interval, or at up to 19 kHz with 4K received RF samples per pulse repetition interval. The first design describes a computer architecture for a Continuous Mode RADAR transceiver with a real-time signal processing and display architecture. The architecture can operate at a high pulse repetition rate without interruption for an infinite amount of time. The second design describes a smaller and less costly burst mode RADAR that can transceive high pulse repetition rate RF signals without interruption for up to 37 seconds. The burst-mode RADAR was designed to operate on an off-line signal processing paradigm. The temporal distribution of RF samples acquired and reported to the RADAR processor remains uniform and free of distortion in both proposed architectures. The majority of the RADAR's electronics is implemented in digital CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor), and analog circuits are restricted to signal amplification operations and analog to digital conversion. An implementation of the proposed systems will create a 1-GHz, Direct RF-digitization Type, L-Band Digital RADAR--the highest band achievable for Nyquist Rate, Direct RF-digitization Systems that do not implement an electronic IF downsample stage (after the receiver signal amplification stage), using commercially available off-the-shelf integrated circuits.

Mallik, Udayan↗

Advances in Digital Calibration Techniques Enabling Real-Time Beamforming SweepSAR Architectures

Real-time digital beamforming, combined with lightweight, large aperture reflectors, enable SweepSAR architectures, which promise significant increases in instrument capability for solid earth and biomass remote sensing. These new instrument concepts require new methods for calibrating the multiple channels, which are combined on-board, in real-time. The benefit of this effort is that it enables a new class of lightweight radar architecture, Digital Beamforming with SweepSAR, providing significantly larger swath coverage than conventional SAR architectures for reduced mass and cost. This paper will review the on-going development of the digital calibration architecture for digital beamforming radar instrument, such as the proposed Earth Radar Mission's DESDynI (Deformation, Ecosystem Structure, and Dynamics of Ice) instrument. This proposed instrument's baseline design employs SweepSAR digital beamforming and requires digital calibration. We will review the overall concepts and status of the system architecture, algorithm development, and the digital calibration testbed currently being developed. We will present results from a preliminary hardware demonstration. We will also discuss the challenges and opportunities specific to this novel architecture.

TR (Transmit/Receive)↗

Considerations for the Next Revision of NASA's Space Telecommunications Radio System Architecture

Development of NASA's Software Defined Radio architecture, the Space Telecommunication Radio System (STRS), was initiated in 2004 with a goal of reducing the cost, risk and schedule when implementing Software Defined Radios (SDR) for National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) space missions. Since STRS was first flown in 2012 on three Software Defined Radios on the Space Communication and Navigation (SCaN) Testbed, only minor changes have been made to the architecture. Multiple entities have since implemented the architecture and provided significant feedback for consideration for the next revision of the standard. The focus for the first set of updates to the architecture is items that enhance application portability. Items that require modifications to existing applications before migrating to the updated architecture will only be considered if there is compelling reasons to make the change. The significant suggestions that were further evaluated for consideration include expanding and clarifying the timing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), improving handle name and identification (ID) definitions and use, and multiple items related to implementation of STRS Devices. In addition to ideas suggested while implementing STRS, SDR technology has evolved significantly and this impact to the architecture needs to be considered. These include incorporating cognitive concepts - learning from past decisions and making new decisions that the radio can act upon. SDRs are also being developed that do not contain a General Purpose Module - which is currently required for the platform to be STRS compliant. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the comments received, provide a summary of the evaluation considerations, and examine planned dispositions.

transmitters receivers↗

Technical Reference Suite Addressing Challenges of Providing Assurance for Fault Management Architectural Design

Research into complexities of software systems Fault Management (FM) and how architectural design decisions affect safety, preservation of assets, and maintenance of desired system functionality has coalesced into a technical reference (TR) suite that advances the provision of safety and mission assurance. The NASA Independent Verification and Validation (IVV) Program, with Software Assurance Research Program support, extracted FM architectures across the IVV portfolio to evaluate robustness, assess visibility for validation and test, and define software assurance methods applied to the architectures and designs. This investigation spanned IVV projects with seven different primary developers, a wide range of sizes and complexities, and encompassed Deep Space Robotic, Human Spaceflight, and Earth Orbiter mission FM architectures. The initiative continues with an expansion of the TR suite to include Launch Vehicles, adding the benefit of investigating differences intrinsic to model-based FM architectures and insight into complexities of FM within an Agile software development environment, in order to improve awareness of how nontraditional processes affect FM architectural design and system health management.

Fitz, Rhonda↗

An Integrated Hybrid Transportation Architecture for Human Mars Expeditions

NASA's Human Spaceflight Architecture Team is developing a reusable hybrid transportation architecture that uses both chemical and electric propulsion systems on the same vehicle to send crew and cargo to Mars destinations such as Phobos, Deimos, the surface of Mars, and other orbits around Mars. By applying chemical and electrical propulsion where each is most effective, the hybrid architecture enables a series of Mars trajectories that are more fuel-efficient than an all chemical architecture without significant increases in flight times. This paper presents an integrated Hybrid in-space transportation architecture for piloted missions and delivery of cargo. A concept for a Mars campaign including orbital and Mars surface missions is described in detail including a system concept of operations and conceptual design. Specific constraints, margin, and pinch points are identified for the architecture and opportunities for critical path commercial and international collaboration are discussed.

Merrill, Raymond G.↗

External Dependencies-Driven Architecture Discovery and Analysis of Implemented Systems

A method for architecture discovery and analysis of implemented systems (AIS) is disclosed. The premise of the method is that architecture decisions are inspired and influenced by the external entities that the software system makes use of. Examples of such external entities are COTS components, frameworks, and ultimately even the programming language itself and its libraries. Traces of these architecture decisions can thus be found in the implemented software and is manifested in the way software systems use such external entities. While this fact is often ignored in contemporary reverse engineering methods, the AIS method actively leverages and makes use of the dependencies to external entities as a starting point for the architecture discovery. The AIS method is demonstrated using the NASA's Space Network Access System (SNAS). The results show that, with abundant evidence, the method offers reusable and repeatable guidelines for discovering the architecture and locating potential risks (e.g. low testability, decreased performance) that are hidden deep in the implementation. The analysis is conducted by using external dependencies to identify, classify and review a minimal set of key source code files. Given the benefits of analyzing external dependencies as a way to discover architectures, it is argued that external dependencies deserve to be treated as first-class citizens during reverse engineering. The current structure of a knowledge base of external entities and analysis questions with strategies for getting answers is also discussed.

Ganesan, Dharmalingam↗

DIAMOND - an Architecture for Persistent Space Platforms

We define DIAMOND, an architecture for generalized, persistent platforms in space, providing support infrastructure for multiple payloads with diverse missions, and able to accept the integration of payloads delivered to the platform after it is established in space. Such platforms would create a new space ecosystem with opportunities for much larger platforms than currently exist, for adaptation to changing technological and market conditions over long periods of time, and for tenants of the platform to launch only their unique payloads without having to carry all the equipment needed to support them. The DIAMOND architecture uses a novel “Architectural Shearing Layer” approach combining long-lived but replaceable structural and support infrastructure components with shorter-lived, higher-value service and tenant facilities. The structural aspect of the proposed architecture is a regular lattice constructed of tetrahedral cells, constructed of only a few types of simple structural components, patterned according to the cubic lattice of natural diamond crystals. The cubic lattice is arranged on larger scales to be fractal sponge, providing a disproportionately large number of surface attachment points while maintaining overall low mass of the entire structure. Generalized architectural shearing layers are also provided that permit easy separation between structural, power, thermal, propulsion/attitude control, pointing/vibration control, computing/data storage, and communication, and various operational aspects of the architecture. The combined result ensures longevity by enabling space platforms to undergo many cycles of change with little peril and at low cost, changing any part of the platform at different times and rates while leaving the remaining parts of the platform undisturbed.

Breidenthal, Julian↗

Zero-Trust Architecture for Autonomous Edge Computing

We are at the apex of an aviation revolution where autonomy will play a central role in enabling complex, multi-agent systems to communicate, interact, and collaborate on a myriad of applications spanning autonomous swarms to wild-fire management. Autonomy is not an absolute but rather a spectrum ranging from a system requiring significant human intervention to one requiring little to none [1]. For example, the extreme, in the case of an autonomous aircraft, is one that operates independently in the airspace interacting with all other elements (air traffic controllers, other pilots) as if it were a human pilot. Critical to this vision is an architecture that enables autonomous agents to interact with minimal latency. Edge computing is an emerging architecture where compute and storage is pushed to the ‘edge’ of the network in order to minimize the round-trip time from agent to resource thereby mitigating the latency associated with cloud-only based approaches. Additionally, services can generate massive amounts of data (e.g., video feeds), which may require analysis in near real-time. Moving this data to the cloud for further processing may not be feasible due to latency, bandwidth, and cost. Privacy, security, and reliability can also be improved by edge computing architectures. However, this geo-distributed and dynamic* architecture complicates the establishment of unambiguous network security boundaries and can lead to vulnerabilities including man in the middle attacks, replay attacks, physical security breaches of edge nodes, signal interception, etc. This motivates the need for zero-trust architectures [2–4] which de-emphasize the notion of static network perimeters and, as the name implies, do not instill any innate trust in any particular agent. It is required that all agents must be authorized and approved in every transaction. In this paper, we present a zero-trust architecture suitable for edge-computing applications that demand significant low-latency, security, privacy, and reliability.

zero trust↗

The Mars 2020 Ground Data System Architecture

The Mars 2020 Mission’s primary objective is to collect 20 geographically unique samples during its prime mission of one and a quarter Martian years, or just over 2 Earth years. Mission planners determined the project needed to develop a system that would enable the operations team to analyze engineering and science data, make science decisions, select viable rover targets at a millimeter resolution and validate an uplink bundle for a car sized rover with more complex science instruments than any previous Mars surface mission. All this had to be done within a five hour time frame. Doing this with a small team would be a challenge, but this had to be accomplished by a large team of engineers and scientists located across North America and Europe. Achieving this level of operational efficiency was unheard of in the prime mission. In addition, the mission had another set of requirements that had nothing to do with surface operations; the Mars 2020 Ground Data System (GDS) was also expected to comply with a new set of security requirements to keep up with the ever changing cybersecurity landscape. The Mars 2020 Ground Data System (GDS) is a re-architected version of the Mars Science Laboratory GDS. The primary goal was to integrate the lessons learned from previous Mars surface missions, accommodate a set of new requirements and capabilities required to ensure mission success, and comply with a new set of cybersecurity controls. The new architecture includes several unique qualities including a data lake, language-agnostic system-wide event-based operations, containerization, automated deployment, network segmentation, infrastructure-as-code, API-driven interfaces, and the first Mars surface GDS to operate primarily in the cloud. The new architecture enabled greater access to the system’s data, tighter integration with the operations team, and a higher level of traceability. The availability of the data also enabled a new set of capabilities previously not possible on surface missions. These new capabilities include an autonomous data to information, pipeline for downlink analysis, horizontal scaling of science data processing capabilities, autonomous round trip data tracking of science and engineering data, integration of flight system state into the tactical planning cycle, high fidelity targeting utilizing kinematic data, and hierarchical image and 3d meshes data representations. This paper will introduce the requirements for the Mars 2020 Mission, the heritage architecture, and the rationale for the changes to achieve the new architecture. The paper will continue to describe the fundamental changes made to the GDS architecture, how these changes enabled a more tightly integrated GDS, and the new capabilities that were enabled by the new architecture. The paper will conclude with the lessons learned from the process of rearchitecting a heritage GDS system and from the first 200 days of operations supporting over 800 users from around the world.

Lopez-Roig, Reynaldo↗

Artemis Navigation Architecture: Early Capabilities and Long Term Evolvability and Evolution

With the awarding of multiple contracts within the Artemis program and building on the success of Artemis I, NASA is investing in and demonstrating the vehicle capabilities necessary for a return to human crewed Lunar Missions. To support activities on the lunar surface, NASA is also assessing architecture options and approaches to enable high precision in-situ navigation within the lunar sphere of influence. These capabilities build on decades of research and advancements within the field, building and evolving the techniques used during Apollo. To support inter-operability and broad application within its elements, NASA conducted a trade on Orbital and Surface Lunar Architecture for PNT. Time-defined mission requirements were captured across elements to inform a phased approach and deployment of needed capability. The architecture must also address unique aspects of the South Pole lunar environments, specifically in terms of harsh lighting and hazardous terrain. To inform the study, documentation of primary users, operational concepts of operations, driving scenarios, and mission needs were used to define performance constraints and phasing. Multiple technologies were assessed in terms of maturity, applicability, and performance to meet the primary user needs forecast. The results of this study support the utilization of in-situ orbital infrastructure to provide a back-bone for navigation and emphasize the need for a common Lunar Reference System and Lunar Time Reference. This deployment can ensure compatibility and enable a high-accuracy in-situ capability. This provides further justification for the capabilities being invested in and deployed by NASA and other international agencies. In addition to including advancements in terrestrial surface navigation, NASA is also applying lessons learned and innovation in the contractual approach to the individual elements by means of a services-based contract mechanism. This impacts the navigation architecture heavily in terms of government and provider roles, in terms of levels of implementation, interoperability, and verification. These distinctions in roles provide constraints to the architecture approach in terms of implementation and integration and will be discussed. The development, use, and mandate of interoperability standards are being deployed to support cross-element compatibility. This paper will provide a summary of the NASA Lunar Navigation needs across its various elements and the proposed deployment of an integrated navigation architecture to support early mission needs with inherent extensibility towards the future.

Evan Anzalone↗

Impacts of common cause failure regulatory requirements on protection system architectures - 304

Regulatory-based design considerations for potential common cause failures (CCF) in digital instrumentation and control (I and C) systems have evolved over time and have impacted the development of protection system I and C architectures. The single failure criterion used to be the main design driver for a protection system I and C architecture and resulted in the familiar four-fold and three-fold system architectures. The single failure criterion has now been replaced by the conservative assumptions associated with digital CCF concerns (i.e., assumed digital CCF coincident with an anticipated operational transient or postulated accident) which are classified as 'beyond design basis events' by regulatory authorities. It is unusual for a beyond design basis event to be the controlling factor for a safety system design but that is now the reality for I and C system designers. The preferred regulatory solution is to introduce diversity into I and C system designs to guard against the general concern of digital CCF. However, the lack of clear criteria on how to define sufficient diversity (i.e., how much, what kind, and whether it is linked to identified digital CCF vulnerabilities) had led to more complex I and C architectures. The trend has been towards lengthy and more difficult reviews for the treatment of digital CCF vulnerabilities and I and C system architectures because of the subjective definition of digital CCF vulnerabilities and the lack of clear acceptance criteria for diversity strategy. Improvement in the treatment of digital CCF is needed to reverse the trend of increased I and C system architecture complexity and longer regulatory reviews. (authors)

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Understanding implications of cathode architecture on energy density of solid-state batteries

Next generation solid-state batteries (SSB) will need to leverage high voltage cathodes, as well as metallic anodes to achieve the realistic performance targets necessary to replace liquid electrolyte-based batteries in cutting-edge applications including electric vehicles. However, limitations arising from mass and charge transports, kinetics and chemo-mechanical degradation at the electrode | electrolyte interface limit the performance of present day SSBs. Optimizing composite cathode architecture, which is an integral part of solid-state batteries, is vital to realize the high-energy density and high-performance goals for next-generation solid-state batteries. Additionally, cathode architecture needs to be optimized for high loadings of active material, well-percolated ion and electron transport pathways and increased resilience against electrochemical stresses. This paper provides a first report of framework for geometric modeling of composite cathode architectures and evaluates the impact of cathode architecture on cell-level energy density using hierarchical models. Packing around primary and secondary active material particles are simulated for a range of active material particle size and solid electrolyte size distributions in the composite cathode. Impact of packing architecture on processing parameters of a given cathode composition and thickness, as well as on achievable energy density is evaluated for a range of commonly used solid electrolyte and cathode materials. Overall, the proposed framework offers a facile exploratory methodology for establishing initial metrics for scalable processing of practical and competent SSBs.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗

Artificial generation of representative single Li-ion electrode particle architectures from microscopy data

Accurately capturing the architecture of single lithium-ion electrode particles is necessary for understanding their performance limitations and degradation mechanisms through multi-physics modeling. Information is drawn from multimodal microscopy techniques to artificially generate LiNi 0.5 Mn 0.3 Co 0.2 O 2 particles with full sub-particle grain detail. Statistical representations of particle architectures are derived from X-ray nano-computed tomography data supporting an ‘outer shell’ model, and sub-particle grain representations are derived from focused-ion beam electron backscatter diffraction data supporting a ‘grain’ model. A random field model used to characterize and generate the outer shells, and a random tessellation model used to characterize and generate grain architectures, are combined to form a multi-scale model for the generation of virtual electrode particles with full-grain detail. This work demonstrates the possibility of generating representative single electrode particle architectures for modeling and characterization that can guide synthesis approaches of particle architectures with enhanced performance.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Evolutionary Architecture Search for Generative Adversarial Networks Based on Weight Sharing

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a powerful generative technique but frequently face challenges with training stability. Network architecture plays a significant role in determining the final output of GANs, but designing a fine architecture demands extensive domain expertise. This article aims to address this issue by searching for high-performance generator’s architectures through neural architecture search (NAS). The proposed approach, called evolutionary weight sharing GANs (EWSGAN), is based on weight sharing and comprises two steps. First, a supernet of the generator is trained using weight sharing. Second, a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) is employed to identify optimal subnets from the supernet. These subnets inherit weights directly from the supernet for fitness assessment. Two strategies are used to stabilize the training of the generator supernet: 1) a fair single-path sampling strategy and 2) a discarding strategy. Experimental results indicate that the architecture searched by our method achieved a new state-of-the-art among NAS–GAN methods with a Fréchet inception distance (FID) of 9.09 and an inception score (IS) of 8.99 on the CIFAR-10 dataset. Finally, it also demonstrates competitive performance on the STL-10 dataset, achieving FID of 21.89 and IS of 10.51.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Light Water Reactor Sustainability Program: Digital Architecture Requirements

The Digital Architecture effort is a part of the Department of Energy (DOE) sponsored Light-Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program conducted at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). The LWRS program is performed in close collaboration with industry research and development (R&D) programs that provides the technical foundations for licensing and managing the long-term, safe, and economical operation of current nuclear power plants (NPPs). One of the primary missions of the LWRS program is to help the U.S. nuclear industry adopt new technologies and engineering solutions that facilitate the continued safe operation of the plants and extension of the current operating licenses. Therefore, a major objective of the LWRS program is the development of a seamless digital environment for plant operations and support by integrating information from plant systems with plant processes for nuclear workers through an array of interconnected technologies. In order to get the most benefits of the advanced technology suggested by the different research activities in the LWRS program, the nuclear utilities need a digital architecture in place to support the technology. A digital architecture can be defined as a collection of information technology (IT) capabilities needed to support and integrate a wide-spectrum of real-time digital capabilities for nuclear power plant performance improvements. It is not hard to imagine that many processes within the plant can be largely improved from both a system and human performance perspective by utilizing a plant wide (or near plant wide) wireless network. For example, a plant wide wireless network allows for real time plant status information to easily be accessed in the control room, field workers’ computer-based procedures can be updated based on the real time plant status, and status on ongoing procedures can be incorporated into smart schedules in the outage command center to allow for more accurate planning of critical tasks. The goal of the digital architecture project is to provide a long-term strategy to integrate plant systems, plant processes, and plant workers. This include technologies to improve nuclear worker efficiency and human performance; to offset a range of plant surveillance and testing activities with new on-line monitoring technologies; improve command, control, and collaboration in settings such as outage control centers and work execution centers; and finally to improve operator performance with new operator aid technologies for the control room. The requirements identified through the activities in the Digital Architecture project will be used to estimate the amount of traffic on the network and hence estimating the minimal bandwidth needed.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗

An Information Theoretic Framework and Self-organizing Agent- based Sensor Network Architecture for Power Plant Condition Monitoring

A central goal of the work was to enable both the extraction of all relevant information from sensor data, and the application of information gained from appropriate processing and fusion at the system level to operational control and decision-making at various levels of the control hierarchy through: 1. Exploiting the deep connection between information theory and the thermodynamic formalism, 2. Deployment using distributed intelligent agents with testing and validation in a hardware-in-the loop simulation environment. Enterprise architectures are the organizing logic for key business processes and IT infrastructure and, while the generality of current definitions provides sufficient flexibility, the current architecture frameworks do not inherently provide the appropriate structure. Of particular concern is that existing architecture frameworks often do not make a distinction between ``data'' and ``information.'' This work defines an enterprise architecture for health and condition monitoring of power plant equipment and further provides the appropriate foundation for addressing shortcomings in current architecture definition frameworks through the discovery of the information connectivity between the elements of a power generation plant. That is, to identify the correlative structure between available observations streams using informational measures. The principle focus here is on the implementation and testing of an emergent, agent-based, algorithm based on the foraging behavior of ants for eliciting this structure and on measures for characterizing differences between communication topologies. The elicitation algorithms are applied to data streams produced by a detailed numerical simulation of Alstom’s 1000 MW ultra-super-critical boiler and steam plant. The elicitation algorithm and topology characterization can be based on different informational metrics for detecting connectivity, e.g. mutual information and linear correlation.

20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS↗

A Practical Introduction to Common Grid Architecture Techniques

The focus of this white paper is to understand the uses and benefits of the practice of Grid Architecture from various stakeholder perspectives. It introduces a few selected Grid Architecture techniques based on their centrality to understanding key structural considerations and their linkage to emerging trends in electricity infrastructure. However, Grid Architecture has many dimensions, some of which exceed the scope of this limited work. This document is a work of the GridWise Architecture Council (GWAC). It is based on guidance from GWAC's Grid Architecture working group members of which have been acknowledged in the document.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Call for Participation: Collaborative Benchmarking of Functional-Structural Root Architecture Models. The Case of Root Water Uptake

Three-dimensional models of root growth, architecture and function are becoming important tools that aid the design of agricultural management schemes and the selection of beneficial root traits. However, while benchmarking is common in many disciplines that use numerical models, such as natural and engineering sciences, functional-structural root architecture models have never been systematically compared. The following reasons might induce disagreement between the simulation results of different models: different representation of root growth, sink term of root water and solute uptake and representation of the rhizosphere. Presently, the extent of discrepancies is unknown, and a framework for quantitatively comparing functional-structural root architecture models is required. We propose, in a first step, to define benchmarking scenarios that test individual components of complex models: root architecture, water flow in soil and water flow in roots. While the latter two will focus mainly on comparing numerical aspects, the root architectural models have to be compared at a conceptual level as they generally differ in process representation. Therefore, defining common inputs that allow recreating reference root systems in all models will be a key challenge. In a second step, benchmarking scenarios for the coupled problems are defined. We expect that the results of step 1 will enable us to better interpret differences found in step 2. This benchmarking will result in a better understanding of the different models and contribute toward improving them. Improved models will allow us to simulate various scenarios with greater confidence and avoid bugs, numerical errors or conceptual misunderstandings. This work will set a standard for future model development.

Plant Sciences↗