Abstract
Interstellar probe swarms must coordinate under extreme latency, intermittent connectivity, and heterogeneous energy budgets. We present Intent-CRDT with Contact-Plan DTN (ICCD), a distributed control framework that maintains coherent mission intent across million-agent populations separated by light-hours. ICCD encodes agent goals and summaries as compact conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs) and schedules dissemination via a contact-plan delay-/disruption-tolerant networking (DTN) layer. Agent-level policies are implemented in Gossamer and executed in the Leviathan Engine with physics fields and latency models, while Maneuver.Map orchestrates multi-generation parameter sweeps and visualization. In large-scale simulations (up to 1×10^6 agents over 3 AU), ICCD reduced age-of-information (AoI) for critical intents by 41% ± 3% and improved formation coherence by 23% over periodic broadcast baselines at equivalent energy/bit. Under 20% relay attrition and 3–5 hour one-way delay, ICCD sustained ≥92% task completion and 0.3 J/KB median energy cost through energy-aware relay rotation. Results indicate that CRDT-based intent combined with contact-aware scheduling can preserve global coordination without centralized control, enabling feasible long-baseline exploration, survey, and construction missions.