Commentary on: "P&S Requirements for ePartner-supported Astronaut-Rover Teams during Planetary Surface Operations"

The article (Grant, Neerincx, and Wolff 2011) introduces some considerations taken from the experience of the authors participation in the ESA project called MECA (Mission Execution Crew Assistant). The idea of MECA is to form a network of agents (both human and software), in which each unit, called e-partner, is capable of detecting and influencing the physical, cognitive and affective state of its respective human users. The article describes the three stages along which the project evolves and presents a list of system requirements among which authors highlight those that can be classified under the label of Planning and Scheduling (P&S). In addition to the P&S requirements the most interesting contribution of the paper is probably the concept of e-partners and the description of the cognitive workload model on the base of which authors think to build the e-partner agent. We subdivide the commentary in different parts. We first offer a slightly different perspective with respect to the role of planning and scheduling, then sketch an architecture for using planning technology in continuous loop with the humans, and then we formulate some questions to corroborate debate at the workshop