Toucans – Next generation ground station scheduling at GSOC

Abstract

Historically control room and ground station scheduling consisted of many scattered, mission-specific approaches, ranging from old isolated desktop tools even to e-mails between mission and station personnel, resulting in a considerable amount of friction and an inferior scheduling experience to operators. To address these issues, GSOC develops Toucans (Tool for Unified Control Room, Antenna and Link Scheduling), a new system for integrated scheduling of control room operators, station passes, and optical links, across all missions operated at GSOC. Despite its early stage, Toucans is already used in missions. We discuss how Toucans fits in the existing scheduling landscape at GSOC, what workflows it provides to operators, and the challenges we faced so far in this project. Eventually, we hope to consolidate various scheduling requirements and solutions, both for ground stations and optical links, in a single tool which delivers fully automated ground scheduling with minimal order deadlines and maximal routine time windows, a convenient and simple user interface for operators, and standard interfaces for automated use. In this paper, we discuss the core aspects of ground station scheduling Toucans eventually needs to address, and share our vision for a fully automated scheduling system. To achieve this goal, Toucans builds on our proven Reactive Planning framework together with the Plains planning library and our interactive PintaOnWeb user interface, as well as using the well-designed CCSDS service management standard as our core data model. Furthermore, a notable part of the paper discusses how we face the criticality of ground station scheduling by following a rigorous development process with strict quality assurance.