MELISSA: global control strategy of the artificial ecosystem by using first principles models of the compartments

MELISSA is a micro-organisms based ecosystem conceived as a tool for understanding the behaviour of artificial ecosystems, and developing the technology for a future biological life support system for long term space mission. The driving element of MELISSA is the recovering of oxygen and edible biomass from waste (faeces, urea). Due to its intrinsic instability and the safety requirements of manned missions, an important control strategy is developed to pilot this system and to optimize its recycling performance. This is a hierarchical control strategy. Each MELISSA compartment has its local control system, and taking into account the states of other compartments and a global desired functioning point, the upper level determines the setpoints for each compartment. The developed approach is based on first principles models of each compartment (physico chemical equations, stoichiometries, kinetic rates, ...). Those models are used to develop a global simulator of the system (in order to study the global functioning). They are also used in the control strategy, which is a non linear predictive model based strategy. This paper presents the general approach of the control strategy of the loop from the compartment level up to the overall loop. At the end, some simulation and experimental results are presented.