Composing Teams with TEAMSTaR: Tool for Evaluating and Mitigating Space Team Risk

Award: #80NSSC21K0925

Period: 01/01/2021 -12/31/2024

As NASA sets its sights on more Earth-independent missions, the mission to Mars as a prime example, a team’s composition becomes a critical issue for mitigating the risks of such endeavors. The purpose of this project is to develop and validate TEAMSTaR (Tool for Evaluating And Mitigating Space Team Risks), a team composition decision support system that can be used by mission stakeholders (e.g., mission schedulers, crew members) to predict how a hypothetical team’s social relationships are likely to evolve and influence crew performance over the course of a mission. TEAMSTaR will enable decision makers to evaluate composition scenarios for a set of teams, for single-member replacements, and/or for subsets of teams.

Our research aims to:

1. Refine agent-based models looking at relevant input characteristics and their ability to predict team outcomes, including team performance.
2. Identify and elaborate the scientific rationale for attributes used within the model, identifying factors known to affect crew functioning, crew member behavior, and emergent characteristics that arise during team task completion.
3. Develop and validate TEAMSTaR, a Team Composition decision support system and user interface.
4. Validate the refined model using a software prototype in at least one extended duration, isolated and confined analog.
5. Provide modeling and software prototypes that meet NASA Standard 7009a.

Research Team