# Proposal of an Automated Mission Manager for Cooperative Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
## 1 Introduction
There is a lack of consideration of the use of a distributed adaptation including a global mission manager. 2. Vehicles' capabilities are typically tightly coupled to the architectures, specifically in regard to mission management at the vehicle level. There is a lack of consideration to the use of vehicles with heterogeneous mission-management capabilities. 3. In underwater interventions, the mission plan is typically loaded into the vehicles before being launched. Consequently, there is also a lack of consideration to the possibility of online transferring of the mission plan to the vehicles. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new mission manager component designed and developed for the SWARMs middleware [21] as part of the efforts of the SWARMs European research project [22]. This mission manager has been designed and developed to be run in a computer at a control station, and not in the vehicles, using the managing-managed subsystem approach from MAPE-K [23]where the AUVs, as the managed subsystems, have also their own self-adaptive capabilities. This approach follows a hierarchical control pattern for decentralized control in self-adaptive systems [23]. The proposed mission manager also includes a basic virtualization of the planning capabilities of the AUVs participating in a mission, enabling the simultaneous use of AUVs with and without onboard planners. Besides, instead of the typical pre-loading of the full mission plan into the AUVs before their deployment, in SWARMs the AUVs are pre-launched and remain in stand-by on the sea surface waiting for the reception of their first task in the mission plan. Then, the proposed mission manager dispatches the assigned tasks to the AUVs one by one. At that moment, the AUV starts the execution of the received tasks and the next one is dispatched by the mission manager as it receives the progress notifications of the current one. In summary, the proposed mission manager fills the gaps previously mentioned by:  
1. Using a hierarchical control pattern for decentralized control, that is novel in the use of mission management architectures for cooperative autonomous underwater vehicles. 2. Designing a virtualization approach related to the mission planning capabilities of the vehicles. 3. Using an online dispatching method for transferring the mission plan to the AUVs. The proposed mission manager was validated for the SWARMs project during its final trials. The results obtained from the performance analysis carried out during the trials show the effectiveness of this approach, and have also provided some interesting results that have allowed us to identify a strong correlation between the mission plan length and the time required to start a mission (\(\rho_{s}=0.79,\ n=45,\ p<0.001\)), as well as a possible bottleneck in the accessing to the repositories to store the live status vectors received from the AUVs during a mission. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents some related works related to mission management architectures for AUVs and identifies the open issues that are covered by the proposed mission manager. Section 3 provides a brief description of the SWARMs architecture and the components and information models related to the mission manager proposal. Section 4 describes the proposed mission manager that has been designed, developed and validated in the SWARMS European research project. Section 5 describes the validation methodology that was used for the proposed mission manager. Section 6 presents and discusses the results from the validation. Finally, Section 7 includes the conclusions obtained from the validation, and discusses some possible future work.