Characterizing Spontaneous Self-Scheduling in NASA's Human Exploration Research Analog Campaign 6

Future deep-space exploration missions will require astronaut crews to leave low-Earth orbit, introducing the new challenge of significant communication delays. Consequently, these crews must be able to act with greater autonomy than in previous and current missions. One approach to enabling greater crew autonomy is self-scheduling, wherein crew members may create and change their operational mission timelines with minimal supervision from the ground. However, scheduling timelines is complex and requires the planner to consider many constraints and requirements. To investigate future crew's ability to self-schedule, we developed a web-based scheduling software tool called Playbook and deployed it in NASA's Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) Campaign 6. After the HERA planner created an initial timeline, crew members used Playbook to self-schedule flexible activities as they desired (i.e., spontaneous self-scheduling). Information about each activity, such as the start time and the crew members assigned before and after any schedule changes, was recorded in Playbook. We analyzed spontaneous Playbook use in four 45-day HERA missions to determine who participated in self-scheduling and why, what activities were self-scheduled, and how activities were changed through self-scheduling. Analysis revealed that all crew utilized Playbook often to reschedule various activities, with 23.8% (1,617 out of 6,802) of all flexible activities rescheduled across missions. We identified three behaviors in spontaneous self-scheduling: 1) activities planned for the future were rescheduled to start immediately (23.6%), 2) activities planned for the current time were delayed to start later (18.7%), and 3) activities had their start times slightly adjusted by ± 30 minutes (57.7%). In addition, we correlated self-scheduling frequency with technology self-sufficiency and preference for autonomy. Self-scheduling frequency was not significantly correlated with either technology self-sufficiency or preference for autonomy, which could be due to a lack of spread in the data and operational constraints. Our results indicate that Playbook and self-scheduling were well accepted by crews and effectively utilized to adapt to schedule changes as they arise and better reflect their personal scheduling preferences.