Toucans - Reactive ground station scheduling for the next decade and beyond

Kurzfassung

At the German Space Operations Center (GSOC) the Mission Planning group is developing Toucans, a comprehensive web-based tool for ground station scheduling and optical link planning. Toucans combines GSOC's generic service-oriented mission planning framework Reactive Planning and GSOC's generic web-based interactive planning tool PintaOnWeb to create real-time, reactive, fully-automated ground station scheduling with a rich interactive multi-user UI to visualize station visibilities and schedules, and interactively edit the schedule, e.g. to order additional passes. It uses existing flight dynamics services at GSOC to obtain orbit data and uses GSOC’s SCOTA service for orbit event calculation, and will use additional services for visibilities and cloud forecast data to enable reactive optical link planning.

The presentation will demonstrate the current status of Toucans and show how we combine GSOC’s generic planning tools on top of contemporary technologies (such as Kubernetes, GraphQL, Angular, or the Pekko actor framework), to implement a generic ground station scheduling system with minimal effort. We will also outline how we manage the evolution of the system’s architecture with structured decision-making processes, and employ a strict code-first rule and QA processes to maintain a resilient system with predictable scheduling outcomes. Furthermore, we illustrate the challenges we faced when integrating our fully automated real-time planning system into a very diverse landscape of different manual and semi-automated heritage planning processes. As an example, we explain how we are replacing existing planning processes one step at a time for the upcoming CAPTn-1 mission and the NSG station to progress towards fully automated station scheduling. Eventually, we will specifically talk about how CCSDS CSSM standards help with this, but also come with significant challenges on their own.