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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2012

Policy-Based Negotiation Engine for Cross-Domain Interoperability

A successful policy negotiation scheme for Policy-Based Management (PBM) has been implemented. Policy negotiation is the process of determining the "best" communication policy that all of the parties involved can agree on. Specifically, the problem is how to reconcile the various (and possibly conflicting) communication protocols used by different divisions. The solution must use protocols available to all parties involved, and should attempt to do so in the best way possible. Which protocols are commonly available, and what the definition of "best" is will be dependent on the parties involved and their individual communications priorities.

Vatan, Farrokh↗
NASA NTRS2010

Efficient Web Services Policy Combination

Large-scale Web security systems usually involve cooperation between domains with non-identical policies. The network management and Web communication software used by the different organizations presents a stumbling block. Many of the tools used by the various divisions do not have the ability to communicate network management data with each other. At best, this means that manual human intervention into the communication protocols used at various network routers and endpoints is required. Developing practical, sound, and automated ways to compose policies to bridge these differences is a long-standing problem. One of the key subtleties is the need to deal with inconsistencies and defaults where one organization proposes a rule on a particular feature, and another has a different rule or expresses no rule. A general approach is to assign priorities to rules and observe the rules with the highest priorities when there are conflicts. The present methods have inherent inefficiency, which heavily restrict their practical applications. A new, efficient algorithm combines policies utilized for Web services. The method is based on an algorithm that allows an automatic and scalable composition of security policies between multiple organizations. It is based on defeasible policy composition, a promising approach for finding conflicts and resolving priorities between rules. In the general case, policy negotiation is an intractable problem. A promising method, suggested in the literature, is when policies are represented in defeasible logic, and composition is based on rules for non-monotonic inference. In this system, policy writers construct metapolicies describing both the policy that they wish to enforce and annotations describing their composition preferences. These annotations can indicate whether certain policy assertions are required by the policy writer or, if not, under what circumstances the policy writer is willing to compromise and allow other assertions to take precedence. Meta-policies are specified in defeasible logic, a computationally efficient non-monotonic logic developed to model human reasoning. One drawback of this method is that at one point the algorithm starts an exhaustive search of all subsets of the set of conclusions of a defeasible theory. Although the propositional defeasible logic has linear complexity, the set of conclusions here may be large, especially in real-life practical cases. This phenomenon leads to an inefficient exponential explosion of complexity. The current process of getting a Web security policy from combination of two meta-policies consists of two steps. The first is generating a new meta-policy that is a composition of the input meta-policies, and the second is mapping the meta-policy onto a security policy. The new algorithm avoids the exhaustive search in the current algorithm, and provides a security policy that matches all requirements of the involved metapolicies.

Vatan, Farrokh↗
NASA NTRS1997

NASA Intellectual Property Negotiation Practices and their Relationship to Quantitative Measures of Technology Transfer

In the current political climate NASA must be able to show reliable measures demonstrating successful technology transfer. The currently available quantitative data of intellectual property technology transfer efforts portray a less than successful performance. In this paper, the use of only quantitative values for measurement of technology transfer is shown to undervalue the effort. In addition, NASA's current policy in negotiating intellectual property rights results in undervalued royalty rates. NASA has maintained that it's position of providing public good precludes it from negotiating fair market value for its technology and instead has negotiated for reasonable cost in order to recover processing fees. This measurement issue is examined and recommendations made which include a new policy regarding the intellectual property rights negotiation, and two measures to supplement the intellectual property measures.

Bush, Lance B.↗
NASA NTRS2012

Communicating the Needs of Climate Change Policy Makers to Scientists

This chapter will describe the challenges that earth scientists face in developing science data products relevant to decision maker and policy needs, and will describe strategies that can improve the two-way communication between the scientist and the policy maker. Climate change policy and decision making happens at a variety of scales - from local government implementing solar homes policies to international negotiations through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Scientists can work to provide data at these different scales, but if they are not aware of the needs of decision makers or understand what challenges the policy maker is facing, they are likely to be less successful in influencing policy makers as they wished. This is because the science questions they are addressing may be compelling, but not relevant to the challenges that are at the forefront of policy concerns. In this chapter we examine case studies of science-policy partnerships, and the strategies each partnership uses to engage the scientist at a variety of scales. We examine three case studies: the global Carbon Monitoring System pilot project developed by NASA, a forest biomass mapping effort for Silvacarbon project, and a forest canopy cover project being conducted for forest management in Maryland. In each of these case studies, relationships between scientists and policy makers were critical for ensuring the focus of the science as well as the success of the decision-making.

Brown, Molly E.↗
NASA NTRS2012

Dynamic Communication Resource Negotiations

Today's advanced network management systems can automate many aspects of the tactical networking operations within a military domain. However, automation of joint and coalition tactical networking across multiple domains remains challenging. Due to potentially conflicting goals and priorities, human agreement is often required before implementation into the network operations. This is further complicated by incompatible network management systems and security policies, rendering it difficult to implement automatic network management, thus requiring manual human intervention to the communication protocols used at various network routers and endpoints. This process of manual human intervention is tedious, error-prone, and slow. In order to facilitate a better solution, we are pursuing a technology which makes network management automated, reliable, and fast. Automating the negotiation of the common network communication parameters between different parties is the subject of this paper. We present the technology that enables inter-force dynamic communication resource negotiations to enable ad-hoc inter-operation in the field between force domains, without pre-planning. It also will enable a dynamic response to changing conditions within the area of operations. Our solution enables the rapid blending of intra-domain policies so that the forces involved are able to inter-operate effectively without overwhelming each other's networks with in-appropriate or un-warranted traffic. It will evaluate the policy rules and configuration data for each of the domains, then generate a compatible inter-domain policy and configuration that will update the gateway systems between the two domains.

policy negotiation↗
NASA NTRS1982

Safety policy and requirements for payloads using the Space Transportation System (STS)

The Space Transportation Operations (STO) safety policy is to minimize STO involvement in the payload and its GSE (ground support equipment) design process while maintaining the assurance of a safe operation. Requirements for assuring payload mission success are the responsibility of the payload organization and are beyond the scope of this document. The intent is to provide the overall safety policies and requirements while allowing for negotiation between the payload organization and the STO operator in the method of implementation of payload safety. This revision provides for a relaxation in the monitoring requirements for inhibits, allows the payload organization to pursue design options and reflects, additionally, some new requirements. As of the issue date of this NHB, payloads which have completed the formal safety assessment reviews of their preliminary design on the basis of the May 1979 issue will be reassessed for compliance with the above changes.

Source record↗
NASA NTRS1985

NASA and the practice of space law

The paper discusses the need for increased awareness in space law due to advances in space technology and a trend toward commercialization of space. A list of national and international treaties, conventions, agreements, laws, and regulations relevant to space activities is presented. NASA lawyers specialize in international and municipal laws that affect the NASA space mission; an example of the lawyers working with insurance companies in negotiating the first Space Shuttle liability policy is provided. The increased participation of the public sector in space activities, for example, the commercialization of the Space Shuttle transportation system, is examined.

Hosenball, S. N.↗
NASA NTRS1999

The Russian-U.S. Experience with Development Joint Medical Support Procedures for Before and After Long-Duration Space Flights

As the Russian Space Agency (RSA) and the U.S. National Aviation and Space Administration (NASA) began in the mid 1990s to plan a preliminary cooperative flight program in anticipation of the International Space Station, programmatic and philosophical differences became apparent in the technical and medical approaches of the two agencies. This paper briefly describes some of these differences and the process by which the two sides resolved differences in their approaches to the medical selection and certification of Shuttle-Mir crew members. These negotiations formed the basis for developing policies on other aspects of the medical support function for international missions, including crew training, preflight and postflight data collection, and rehabilitation protocols. The experience gained through this cooperative effort has been invaluable for developing medical care capabilities for the International Space Station.

Morgun, V. V.↗
NASA NTRS2001

Unequal Bargaining? Australia's Aviation Trade Relations with the United States

International aviation trade bargaining is distinguished by its use of a formal process of bilateral bargaining based on the reciprocal exchange of rights by states. Australia-United States aviation trade relations are currently without rancour, but this has not always been the case and in the late 1980s and early 1990s, their formal bilateral aviation negotiations were a forum for a bitter conflict between two competing international aviation policies. In seeking to explain the bilateral aviation outcomes between Australia and the United States and how Australia has sought to improve upon these, analytical frameworks derived from international political economy were considered, along with the bilateral bargaining process itself. The paper adopts a modified neorealist model and concludes that to understand how Australia has sought to improve upon these aviation outcomes, neorealist assumptions that relative power capabilities determine outcomes must be qualified by reference to the formal bilateral bargaining process. In particular, Australia's use of this process and its application of certain bargaining tactics within that process remain critical to understanding bilateral outcomes.

Solomon, Russell↗
NASA NTRS1981

International space policy and the interests of the United States and developing countries

The paper discusses principles which must be upheld in order to protect U.S. interests in space, the potential impact of the Moon Treaty on these principles, how to satisfy the legitimate needs of developing countries while protecting U.S. interests, and how to enhance the probability of success in future negotiations concerning space. It is suggested that, in order to preserve the rights of its citizens and industry to exploit space, the United States must make a strong effort to help solve the problems of the developing countries, maintain a strong space program, and develop and follow a space policy that reflects the interests of the American people.

Bon, B.↗
NASA NTRS2015

Security-Enhanced Autonomous Network Management

Ensuring reliable communication in next-generation space networks requires a novel network management system to support greater levels of autonomy and greater awareness of the environment and assets. Intelligent Automation, Inc., has developed a security-enhanced autonomous network management (SEANM) approach for space networks through cross-layer negotiation and network monitoring, analysis, and adaptation. The underlying technology is bundle-based delay/disruption-tolerant networking (DTN). The SEANM scheme allows a system to adaptively reconfigure its network elements based on awareness of network conditions, policies, and mission requirements. Although SEANM is generically applicable to any radio network, for validation purposes it has been prototyped and evaluated on two specific networks: a commercial off-the-shelf hardware test-bed using Institute of Electrical Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 Wi-Fi devices and a military hardware test-bed using AN/PRC-154 Rifleman Radio platforms. Testing has demonstrated that SEANM provides autonomous network management resulting in reliable communications in delay/disruptive-prone environments.

Zeng, Hui↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Test & Measurement System Security in an IT World

Automated test and measurement systems are coming under increased cybersecurity scrutiny. Most of these systems fall under the “Operational Technology” designation, as defined by NIST, and often have unique requirements that conflict with enterprise security policy. These systems are typically not well understood by traditional enterprise IT personnel, which leaves them ill-supported or invalidated.▪This presentation attempts to help Test System owners recognize the security landscape, determine their unique system requirements and concerns, and negotiate a peer-level working arrangement with an existing IT department while maintaining a NIST-recommended level of autonomy and sovereignty.

automated test↗
NASA NTRS1987

International cooperation in the Space Station

The principles and policies governing participation in the International Space Station are examined from a NASA perspective. The history of the program is reviewed; the most important aspects of the partnership concept (functional allocation, shared access, and interface commonality) are considered in detail; and the ongoing outfitting studies are briefly characterized. Major issues remaining to be negotiated include (1) the overall management structure; (2) the division of responsibilities for system design, integration, operation, and utilization; and (3) the sharing of operating costs.

Raney, William P.↗
NASA NTRS2001

National Environmental Change Information System Case Study

The Global Hydrology and Climate Center and NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center conducted a fact-finding case study for the Data Management Working Group (DMWG), now referred to as the Data and Information Working Group (DIWG), of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) to determine the feasibility of an interagency National Environmental Change Information System (NECIS). In order to better understand the data and information needs of policy and decision makers at the national, state, and local level, the DIWG asked the case study team to choose a regional water resources issue in the southeastern United States that had an impact on a diverse group of stakeholders. The southeastern United States was also of interest because the region experiences interannual climatic variations and impacts due to El Nino and La Nina. Jointly, with input from the DIWG, a focus on future water resources planning in the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint (ACF) River basins of Alabama, Georgia, and Florida was selected. A tristate compact and water allocation formula is currently being negotiated between the states and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (COE) that will affect the availability of water among competing uses within the ACF River basin. All major reservoirs on the ACF are federally owned and operated by the U.S. Army COE. A similar two-state negotiation is ongoing that addresses the water allocations in the adjacent Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa (ACT) River basin, which extends from northwest Georgia to Mobile Bay. The ACF and ACT basins are the subject of a comprehensive river basin study involving many stakeholders. The key objectives of this case study were to identify specific data and information needs of key stakeholders in the ACF region, determine what capabilities are needed to provide the most practical response to these user requests, and to identify any limitations in the use of federal data and information. The NECIS case study followed the terms of reference developed by the interagency DIWG. The case study "lessons learned" and "key findings" offer guidelines and considerations to the DMWG for the development and implementation of a NECIS that would support the data and information needs of policy and decision makers at the national, state, and local level.

Goodman, S. J.↗
NASA NTRS1992

The post Challenger era Get Away Special program January 1992

The Get Away Special (GAS) program is described in terms of the changes that have taken place in both NASA and the GAS itself. Attention is given to the relationships developed between NASA and GAS customers in the context of programmatic and technical issues. The background of the GAS program is outlined with reference given to policy publications, the design of the Flight Verification Payload, and the first GAS payload launched. A review process is described that facilitates the management of the payloads through flight certification. The GAS Bridge was developed to carry up to 12 payloads simultaneously, and the recent period of GAS inactivity is explained. A price increase is introduced for future GAS payloads with negotiable access to optional services, and the ease and accessibility of the GAS programs for private experiments is emphasized.

Prouty, Clarke↗
NASA NTRS2021

Scheduling the NASA Deep Space Network with Deep Reinforcement Learning

With three complexes spread evenly across the Earth, NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) is the primary means of communications as well as a significant scientific instrument for dozens of active missions around the world. A rapidly rising number of spacecraft and increasingly complex scientific instruments with higher bandwidth requirements have resulted in demand that exceeds the network’s capacity across its 12 antennae. The existing DSN scheduling process operates on a rolling weekly basis and is time-consuming; for a given week, generation of the final baseline schedule of spacecraft tracking passes takes roughly 5 months from the initial requirements submission deadline, with several weeks of peer-to-peer negotiations in between. This paper proposes a deep reinforcement learning (RL) approach to generate candidate DSN schedules from mission requests and spacecraft ephemeris data with demonstrated capability to address real-world operational constraints. A deep RL agent is developed that takes mission requests for a given week as input, and interacts with a DSN scheduling environment to allocate tracks such that its reward signal is maximized. A comparison is made between an agent trained using Proximal Policy Optimization and its random, untrained counterpart. The results represent a proof-of-concept that, given a well-shaped reward signal, a deep RL agent can learn the complex heuristics used by experts to schedule the DSN. A trained agent can potentially be used to generate candidate schedules to bootstrap the scheduling process and thus reduce the turnaround cycle for DSN scheduling.

Wilson, Brian↗
NASA NTRS1997

Multiple Hub Network Choice in the Liberalized European Market

A key question that so far has received relatively little attention in the germane literature is that of the changes at various airports as a result of the EU liberalization policies. That is, presently, most major European airports still benefit from the so-called home-carrier phenomenon where the country's publicly or semi-publicly owned carrier uses the country's main airport as its gateway hub and, consequently, the home-carrier is also the principal user of this airport (in terms of proportion of total aircraft movements, number of passengers transported, connections, slots ownership, etc.). The country's main airport has substantially benefited from these monopoly conditions of airline captivity, strongly determined by the bilateral system of international air transport regulation. Therefore, European major airports were used to operate in essentially different markets, compared to the increasingly competitive markets of their home based carriers. This partly explains relative stability of transport volumes and financial results of European major airports compared to the relatively volatile financial results of most European national airlines. However, the liberalization of European aviation is likely to change this situation. Market access is open now to all community carriers, i.e. carriers with majority ownership and effective control in the hands of EU citizens. Ticket prices are free, governments can only intervene in case of dumping or excessive pricing. A community airline can choose its seat in any of the 15 member states. Licensing procedures are harmonized between member states. In the last few months community carriers have had unrestricted route access within the EU. Most probably this development will be extended to countries inside and outside Europe. Last year the European Commission got the mandate to start negotiations with 10 other European countries. In the meantime the EC has also started negotiations with the USA on so-called soft rights. In the meantime, open skies agreements have been concluded between the USA and most of the EU member states to facilitate strategic alliances between airlines of the states involved. As a result of this on-going liberalization the model of the single 'national' carrier using the national home base as its single hub for the designated third, fourth and sixth freedom operations will stepwise disappear. Within the EU the concept of the national carrier has already been replaced by that of the community carrier. State ownership in more and more European carriers is reduced. On the longer run mergers or even bankruptcy will further undermine the "single national carrier - single national hub" model in Europe. In the meantime, strategic alliances between national carriers in Europe will already reduce the airlines' loyalty to a single airport. Profit maximization and accountability to share holders will supersede the loyalty of these newly emerging alliances, probably looking for the opportunities of a multiple hub network to adequately cover the whole European market. As a consequence, some European airports might see a substantial decline in arriving, departing and transfer traffic, thus in revenues and financial solvency, as well as in their connection to other inter-continental and intra-European destinations. At the same time, other airports might realize a significant increase in traffic as they will be sought after by the profit maximizing airlines as their major gateway hubs. Which will be the losing airports and which will be the winning ones? Can airports anticipate the actions of airlines in deregulated markets and utilize policies which will improve their relative position? If so, what should be these anticipatory policies? These questions become the more urgent, since an increasing number of major European airports will be privatized in the near future. Although increasing airport congestion in Europe will also be reflected in a growing demand pressure for airport slots, this is not a guarantee for a stable transport volume growth of individual airports. The more volatile the market is, the more vulnerable privatized airports become. Therefore, the main issue of this study is the analysis of the opportunities of major European airports to become a central hub as a result of the network choices made by the new European airlines in a completely liberalized market. In a previous study (Berechman and de Wit, 1996), we already explored the potential of Amsterdam Airport Schiphol of becoming the major West-European hub, once European aviation markets are deregulated. A major hindrance of that study was the use of a single hub-and-spoke network. For example that model could not analyze the viability of different combinations of European hubs within a multiple hub network of alternative airline alliances. In this study, we have formulated the model of a multi-hub network where two West-European airports are used for inter-continental and intra-European travel to enable a more realistic analysis of hub choice. Like the previous one also this multi-hub model is primarily used to assess the potential ability of Amsterdam Airport Schiphol for becoming a major West-European hub. Thus, in particular, the policy tests focus on this airport in a double hub network.

Berechman, Joseph↗