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NASA exploration missions require a small group of humans to live in hostile environments for extended time periods. Under such circumstances it is necessary to provide automated regenerative life support systems that can be managed by a few people. The Distributed Collaboration and Interaction (DCI) System ensures safe, effective operations with such automated systems by aiding humans in supervising and using control automation while working remote from the physical system. In this paper we describe DCI and present the results of using it to assist control engineers remotely supervising an automated water recovery subsystem during a ground test at JSC.

Human interaction challenges for intelligent environmental control software involve finding the right balance between automation and the flexibility for human involvement. Automation is needed to relieve people from the tedium of maintaining a vigilant watch over low-level sensor data and controlling each life support hardware item individually. Flexibility is needed to deal effectively with anomalies and novel situations. This paper discusses strategies for supporting management by exception and shows how those strategies were implemented in support of the automated control system for product gas transfer during the Phase III Test of the Lunar/Mars Life Support Test Program.