The Link Management System for the European Data Relay System

Abstract

A new scheduling system is under implementation at the German Space Operations Center to support the EDRS mission with its two payloads in the geostationary orbit. The tasks of this Link Management System involve receiving and checking the operational plan from the Mission Operations Center, scheduling additional payload-related maintenance activities, and relaying the resulting timeline incrementally towards the automated control system, while respecting all spacecraft constraints. By its design, the Link Management System already incorporates some ideas and functionality of the upcoming GSOC Reactive Planning framework. Within this paper, the scheduling tasks and implemented algorithms are described in the context of being as generic as possible for both the EDRS-A and EDRS-C payloads and already including concepts and some code base of the upcoming GSOC Reactive Planning framework.