Using Explainable Scheduling for the Mars 2020 Rover Mission

Abstract

Understanding the reasoning behind the behavior of an auto- mated scheduling system is essential to ensure that it will be trusted and consequently used to its full capabilities in critical applications. In cases where a scheduler schedules activities in an invalid location, it is usually easy for the user to infer the missing constraint by inspecting the schedule with the in- valid activity to determine the missing constraint. If a sched- uler fails to schedule activities because constraints could not be satisfied, determining the cause can be more challenging. In such cases it is important to understand which constraints caused the activities to fail to be scheduled and how to al- ter constraints to achieve the desired schedule. In this pa- per, we describe such a scheduling system for NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover, as well as Crosscheck, an explain- able scheduling tool that explains the scheduler behavior. The scheduling system and Crosscheck are the baseline for oper- ational use to schedule activities for the Mars 2020 rover. As we describe, the scheduler generates a schedule given a set of activities and their constraints and Crosscheck: (1) provides a visual representation of the generated schedule; (2) analyzes and explains why activities failed to schedule given the con- straints provided; and (3) provides guidance on potential con- straint relaxations to enable the activities to schedule in future scheduler runs.