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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 829 records · Page 46

All sources NASA NTRS DOE OSTI

NASA NTRS1995

Client/server study

The goal of this project is to find cost-effective and efficient strategies/solutions to integrate existing databases, manage network, and improve productivity of users in a move towards client/server and Integrated Desktop Environment (IDE) at NASA LeRC. The project consisted of two tasks as follows: (1) Data collection, and (2) Database Development/Integration. Under task 1, survey questionnaires and a database were developed. Also, an investigation on commercially available tools for automated data-collection and net-management was performed. As requirements evolved, the main focus has been task 2 which involved the following subtasks: (1) Data gathering/analysis of database user requirements, (2) Database analysis and design, making recommendations for modification of existing data structures into relational database or proposing a common interface to access heterogeneous databases(INFOMAN system, CCNS equipment list, CCNS software list, USERMAN, and other databases), (3) Establishment of a client/server test bed at Central State University (CSU), (4) Investigation of multi-database integration technologies/ products for IDE at NASA LeRC, and (5) Development of prototypes using CASE tools (Object/View) for representative scenarios accessing multi-databases and tables in a client/server environment. Both CSU and NASA LeRC have benefited from this project. CSU team investigated and prototyped cost-effective/practical solutions to facilitate NASA LeRC move to a more productive environment. CSU students utilized new products and gained skills that could be a great resource for future needs of NASA.

Dezhgosha, Kamyar↗

NASA NTRS1985

Space station common module power system network topology and hardware development

Candidate power system newtork topologies for the space station common module are defined and developed and the necessary hardware for test and evaluation is provided. Martin Marietta's approach to performing the proposed program is presented. Performance of the tasks described will assure systematic development and evaluation of program results, and will provide the necessary management tools, visibility, and control techniques for performance assessment. The plan is submitted in accordance with the data requirements given and includes a comprehensive task logic flow diagram, time phased manpower requirements, a program milestone schedule, and detailed descriptions of each program task.

Landis, D. M.↗

NASA NTRS2010

Handling Emergency Management in [an] Object Oriented Modeling Environment

It has been understood that protection of a nation from extreme disasters is a challenging task. Impacts of extreme disasters on a nation's critical infrastructures, economy and society could be devastating. A protection plan itself would not be sufficient when a disaster strikes. Hence, there is a need for a holistic approach to establish more resilient infrastructures to withstand extreme disasters. A resilient infrastructure can be defined as a system or facility that is able to withstand damage, but if affected, can be readily and cost-effectively restored. The key issue to establish resilient infrastructures is to incorporate existing protection plans with comprehensive preparedness actions to respond, recover and restore as quickly as possible, and to minimize extreme disaster impacts. Although national organizations will respond to a disaster, extreme disasters need to be handled mostly by local emergency management departments. Since emergency management departments have to deal with complex systems, they have to have a manageable plan and efficient organizational structures to coordinate all these systems. A strong organizational structure is the key in responding fast before and during disasters, and recovering quickly after disasters. In this study, the entire emergency management is viewed as an enterprise and modelled through enterprise management approach. Managing an enterprise or a large complex system is a very challenging task. It is critical for an enterprise to respond to challenges in a timely manner with quick decision making. This study addresses the problem of handling emergency management at regional level in an object oriented modelling environment developed by use of TopEase software. Emergency Operation Plan of the City of Hampton, Virginia, has been incorporated into TopEase for analysis. The methodology used in this study has been supported by a case study on critical infrastructure resiliency in Hampton Roads.

Tokgoz, Berna Eren↗

DOE OSTI2016

Design Guidance for Computer-Based Procedures for Field Workers

Nearly all activities that involve human interaction with nuclear power plant systems are guided by procedures, instructions, or checklists. Paper-based procedures (PBPs) currently used by most utilities have a demonstrated history of ensuring safety; however, improving procedure use could yield significant savings in increased efficiency, as well as improved safety through human performance gains. The nuclear industry is constantly trying to find ways to decrease human error rates, especially human error rates associated with procedure use. As a step toward the goal of improving field workers’ procedure use and adherence and hence improve human performance and overall system reliability, the U.S. Department of Energy Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program researchers, together with the nuclear industry, have been investigating the possibility and feasibility of replacing current paper-based procedures with computer-based procedures (CBPs). PBPs have ensured safe operation of plants for decades, but limitations in paper-based systems do not allow them to reach the full potential for procedures to prevent human errors. The environment in a nuclear power plant is constantly changing, depending on current plant status and operating mode. PBPs, which are static by nature, are being applied to a constantly changing context. This constraint often results in PBPs that are written in a manner that is intended to cover many potential operating scenarios. Hence, the procedure layout forces the operator to search through a large amount of irrelevant information to locate the pieces of information relevant for the task and situation at hand, which has potential consequences of taking up valuable time when operators must be responding to the situation, and potentially leading operators down an incorrect response path. Other challenges related to use of PBPs are management of multiple procedures, place-keeping, finding the correct procedure for a task, and relying on other sources of additional information to ensure a functional and accurate understanding of the current plant status (Converse, 1995; Fink, Killian, Hanes, and Naser, 2009; Le Blanc, Oxstrand, and Waicosky, 2012). This report provides design guidance to be used when designing the human-system interaction and the design of the graphical user interface for a CBP system. The guidance is based on human factors research related to the design and usability of CBPs conducted by Idaho National Laboratory, 2012 - 2016.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗

NASA NTRS2010

Pilot and Controller Workload and Situation Awareness with Three Traffic Management Concept

This paper reports on workload and situation awareness of pilots and controllers participating in a human-in-the-loop simulation using three different distributed air-ground traffic management concepts. Eight experimental pilots started the scenario in an en-route phase of flight and were asked to avoid convective weather while performing spacing and merging tasks along with a continuous descent approach (CDA) into Louisville Standiford Airport (SDF). Two controllers managed the sectors through which the pilots flew, with one managing a sector that included the Top of Descent, and the other managing a sector that included the merge point for arrival into SDF. At 3-minute intervals in the scenario, pilots and controllers were probed on their workload or situation awareness. We employed one of three concepts of operation that distributed separation responsibility across human controllers, pilots, and automation to measure changes in operator situation awareness and workload. We found that when pilots were responsible for separation, they had higher levels of awareness, but not necessarily higher levels of workload. When controllers are responsible and actively engaged, they showed higher workload levels compared to pilots and changes in awareness that were dependent on sector characteristics.

Vu, Kim-Phuong L.↗

NASA NTRS1986

Manned Mars mission communication and data management systems

A manned Mars mission will involve a small crew and many complex tasks. The productivity of the crew and the entire mission will depend significantly on effective automation of these tasks and the ease with which the crew can interface with them. The technology to support a manned Mars mission is available today; however, evolving software and electronic technology are enabling many interesting possibilities for increasing productivity and safety while reducing life cycle cost. Some of these advanced technologies are identified.

White, Ronald E.↗

NASA NTRS2006

Data Model Management for Space Information Systems

The Reference Architecture for Space Information Management (RASIM) suggests the separation of the data model from software components to promote the development of flexible information management systems. RASIM allows the data model to evolve independently from the software components and results in a robust implementation that remains viable as the domain changes. However, the development and management of data models within RASIM are difficult and time consuming tasks involving the choice of a notation, the capture of the model, its validation for consistency, and the export of the model for implementation. Current limitations to this approach include the lack of ability to capture comprehensive domain knowledge, the loss of significant modeling information during implementation, the lack of model visualization and documentation capabilities, and exports being limited to one or two schema types. The advent of the Semantic Web and its demand for sophisticated data models has addressed this situation by providing a new level of data model management in the form of ontology tools. In this paper we describe the use of a representative ontology tool to capture and manage a data model for a space information system. The resulting ontology is implementation independent. Novel on-line visualization and documentation capabilities are available automatically, and the ability to export to various schemas can be added through tool plug-ins. In addition, the ingestion of data instances into the ontology allows validation of the ontology and results in a domain knowledge base. Semantic browsers are easily configured for the knowledge base. For example the export of the knowledge base to RDF/XML and RDFS/XML and the use of open source metadata browsers provide ready-made user interfaces that support both text- and facet-based search. This paper will present the Planetary Data System (PDS) data model as a use case and describe the import of the data model into an ontology tool. We will also describe the current effort to provide interoperability with the European Space Agency (ESA)/Planetary Science Archive (PSA) which is critically dependent on a common data model.

RDF↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Semantic Search with Sentence-BERT for Design Information Retrieval

Managing and referencing design knowledge is a critical activity in the design process. However, reliably retrieving useful knowledge can be a frustrating experience for users of knowledge management systems due to inherent limitations of standard keyword-based searches. In this research, we consider the task of retrieving relevant lessons learned from the NASA Lessons Learned Information System (LLIS). To this end, we apply a state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) technique for information retrieval: semantic search with sentence-BERT, which is a modification of a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model that uses siamese and triplet network architectures to obtain semantically meaningful sentence embeddings. While the pretrained sBERT model shows excellent out-of-the-box performance, we further fine-tune the model on data from the LLIS so that it learns on design engineering-relevant vocabulary. We quantify the improvement in query results using both standard sBERT and fine-tuned sBERT over the LLIS’s built-in keyword search. Additionally, we demonstrate a use case for the query system by searching for lessons learned relevant to specific requirements from a NASA project as part of a broader knowledge management and retrieval system. Results indicate that applying state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques, especially when fine-tuned using engineering data, to design information retrieval tasks shows significant promise in modernizing design knowledge management systems.

Hannah S. Walsh↗

DOE OSTI2018

New approach based on group technology for the consolidation problem in cloud computing-mathematical model and genetic algorithm

Resource management is a hotspot issue in distributed systems like cloud computing (CC). It means how to prepare the computational resources, i.e., servers and virtual machines (VMS), to execute the tasks. This paper offers a new approach based on Group Technology (GT)—known as a powerful philosophy for the resource management in cellular manufacturing systems—to deal with the resource management problem in CC. We develop a mathematical model to optimally consolidate the VMs, servers and tasks simultaneously to control several important factors such as task migrations and server load variation, as well as the number of VMs. To test the validity of our proposed model, several small problems are generated randomly and solved by LINGO 9 software. Furthermore, to cope with larger problems, which cannot be solved optimally, a genetic algorithm is proposed. We, finally, compare our methods with the most well-known algorithms in this context, round robin (RR) and first-come, first-served (FCFS) algorithms.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

NASA NTRS2004

Ecology Based Decentralized Agent Management System

The problem of maintaining a desired number of mobile agents on a network is not trivial, especially if we want a completely decentralized solution. Decentralized control makes a system more r e bust and less susceptible to partial failures. The problem is exacerbated on wireless ad hoc networks where host mobility can result in significant changes in the network size and topology. In this paper we propose an ecology-inspired approach to the management of the number of agents. The approach associates agents with living organisms and tasks with food. Agents procreate or die based on the abundance of uncompleted tasks (food). We performed a series of experiments investigating properties of such systems and analyzed their stability under various conditions. We concluded that the ecology based metaphor can be successfully applied to the management of agent populations on wireless ad hoc networks.

Peysakhov, Maxim D.↗

NASA NTRS1992

Kennedy Space Center's NASA/Contractor Team-Centered Total Quality Management Seminar: Results, methods, and lessons learned

It is apparent to everyone associated with the Nation's aeronautics and space programs that the challenge of continuous improvement can be reasonably addressed only if NASA and its contractors act together in a fully integrated and cooperative manner that transcends the traditional boundaries of proprietary interest. It is, however, one thing to assent to the need for such integration and cooperation; it is quite another thing to undertake the hard tasks of turning such a need into action. Whatever else total quality management is, it is fundamentally a team-centered and team-driven process of continuous improvement. The introduction of total quality management at KSC, therefore, has given the Center a special opportunity to translate the need for closer integration and cooperation among all its organizations into specific initiatives. One such initiative that NASA and its contractors have undertaken at KSC is a NASA/Contractor team-centered Total Quality Management Seminar. It is this seminar which is the subject of this paper. The specific purposes of this paper are to describe the following: Background, development, and evolution of Kennedy Space Center's Total Quality Management Seminar; Special characteristics of the seminar; Content of the seminar; Meaning and utility of a team-centered design for TQM training; Results of the seminar; Use that one KSC contractor, EG&G Florida, Inc. has made of the seminar in its Total Quality Management initiative; and Lessons learned.

Kinlaw, Dennis C.↗

DOE OSTI2015

Operational plant lifetime assessment - UK national nuclear laboratory experience - 15366

Inspection and monitoring of the condition of key plant assets at the Sellafield Site is an important task in helping to enable the continued operation of the reprocessing and waste management facilities. This takes place within a range of environments, from non-active areas to highly active black cells where no man-access is possible. NNL staff work closely with the plant operators and other contractors in carrying out inspection and monitoring tasks, and have a particular expertise in the black cell environments where increased challenges exist. As plants age more work is required in order to underpin ongoing operations and understand the operational lifetime of key assets in order to achieve maximum throughput and utilisation. This paper discusses how expertise in a variety of different technical disciplines is combined in order to both understand and extend the operational life of the Highly Active (HA) evaporators at Sellafield, and a small number of further similar examples are also discussed. (authors)

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

DOE OSTI2017

Preliminary Concept of Operations for the Spent Fuel Management System--WM2017

The Nuclear Fuels Storage and Transportation Planning Project (NFST) within the U.S. Department of Energy s Office of Nuclear Energy is tasked with identifying, planning, and conducting activities to lay the groundwork for developing interim storage and transportation capabilities in support of an integrated waste management system. The system will provide interim storage for commercial spent nuclear fuel (SNF) from reactor sites and deliver it to a repository. The system will also include multiple subsystems, potentially including; one or more interim storage facilities (ISF); one or more repositories; facilities to package and/or repackage SNF; and transportation systems. The project team is analyzing options for an integrated waste management system. To support analysis, the project team has developed a Concept of Operations document that describes both the potential integrated system and inter-dependencies between system components. The goal of this work is to aid systems analysts in the development of consistent models across the project, which involves multiple investigators. The Concept of Operations document will be updated periodically as new developments emerge. At a high level, SNF is expected to travel from reactors to a repository. SNF is first unloaded from reactors and placed in spent fuel pools for wet storage at utility sites. After the SNF has cooled enough to satisfy loading limits, it is placed in a container at reactor sites for storage and/or transportation. After transportation requirements are met, the SNF is transported to an ISF to store the SNF until a repository is developed or directly to a repository if available. While the high level operation of the system is straightforward, analysts must evaluate numerous alternative options. Alternative options include the number of ISFs (if any), ISF design, the stage at which SNF repackaging occurs (if any), repackaging technology, the types of containers used, repository design, component sizing, and timing of events. These alternative options arise due to technological, economic, or policy considerations. As new developments regularly emerge, the operational concepts will be periodically updated. This paper gives an overview of the different potential alternatives identified in the Concept of Operations document at a conceptual level.

Cumberland, Riley M↗

DOE OSTI2020

TaskWorks v1.0

TaskWorks is a portable, high-level, task engine designed for HPC workloads. Applications can create tasks and define dependencies between them with the task engine. Once the task is defined and submitted to TaskWorks, the TaskWorks engine will execute it according to the specified dependencies, without additional input from the application. TaskWorks has an integrated event manager monitors files, sockets, timers, and MPI operations, and these events can be used as task dependencies. TaskWorks is compatible with MPI and is designed to work efficiently with HPC applications that perform.

Koziol, Quincey↗

NASA NTRS1996

Review of Issues Associated with Safe Operation and Management of the Space Shuttle Program

At the request of the President of the United States through the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the NASA Administrator tasked the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel with the responsibility to identify and review issues associated with the safe operation and management of the Space Shuttle program arising from ongoing efforts to improve and streamline operations. These efforts include the consolidation of operations under a single Space Flight Operations Contract (SFOC), downsizing the Space Shuttle workforce and reducing costs of operations and management. The Panel formed five teams to address the potentially significant safety impacts of the seven specific topic areas listed in the study Terms of Reference. These areas were (in the order in which they are presented in this report): Maintenance of independent safety oversight; implementation plan for the transition of Shuttle program management to the Lead Center; communications among NASA Centers and Headquarters; transition plan for downsizing to anticipated workforce levels; implementation of a phased transition to a prime contractor for operations; Shuttle flight rate for Space Station assembly; and planned safety and performance upgrades for Space Station assembly. The study teams collected information through briefings, interviews, telephone conversations and from reviewing applicable documentation. These inputs were distilled by each team into observations and recommendations which were then reviewed by the entire Panel.

Johnstone, Paul M.↗

NASA NTRS2008

Software Schedules Missions, Aids Project Management

NASA missions require advanced planning, scheduling, and management, and the Space Agency has worked extensively to develop the programs and software suites necessary to facilitate these complex missions. These enormously intricate undertakings have hundreds of active components that need constant management and monitoring. It is no surprise, then, that the software developed for these tasks is often applicable in other high-stress, complex environments, like in government or industrial settings. NASA work over the past few years has resulted in a handful of new scheduling, knowledge-management, and research tools developed under contract with one of NASA s partners. These tools have the unique responsibility of supporting NASA missions, but they are also finding uses outside of the Space Program.

Source record↗

DOE OSTI2025

Osprey Framework v0.2.2

The Alpha Berkeley Framework is a software architecture for building agentic AI systems that coordinate multi-step workflows in scientific and industrial environments. It is based on a plan-first orchestration model, where natural language requests are translated into execution plans with explicit dependencies and optional human approval. The framework includes capability classification, which selects relevant tools on a per-task basis to keep orchestration efficient as the number of available tools grows. It incorporates task extraction methods that compress conversational context and integrate external resources such as databases, APIs, and knowledge bases into structured, machine-readable tasks. Execution is supported by modular services with checkpointing, artifact management, and error handling, allowing workflows to be paused, inspected, and resumed. The system is designed for deployment in production environments, supporting both local and containerized execution as well as integration with HPC clusters. Interfaces include command-line tools, browser-based workflows, and containerized services. The framework has been demonstrated in tutorial examples and deployed at the Advanced Light Source, where it coordinates accelerator control and analysis workflows.

Hellert, Thorsten [Lawrence Berkeley National Labo↗

DOE OSTI2015

Peeking Network States with Clustered Patterns

Network traffic monitoring has long been a core element for effec- tive network management and security. However, it is still a chal- lenging task with a high degree of complexity for comprehensive analysis when considering multiple variables and ever-increasing traffic volumes to monitor. For example, one of the widely con- sidered approaches is to scrutinize probabilistic distributions, but it poses a scalability concern and multivariate analysis is not gen- erally supported due to the exponential increase of the complexity. In this work, we propose a novel method for network traffic moni- toring based on clustering, one of the powerful deep-learning tech- niques. We show that the new approach enables us to recognize clustered results as patterns representing the network states, which can then be utilized to evaluate “similarity” of network states over time. In addition, we define a new quantitative measure for the similarity between two compared network states observed in dif- ferent time windows, as a supportive means for intuitive analysis. Finally, we demonstrate the clustering-based network monitoring with public traffic traces, and show that the proposed approach us- ing the clustering method has a great opportunity for feasible, cost- effective network monitoring.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗