PintaOnWeb - enabling versatile solutions for interactive planning and scheduling

Kurzfassung

PintaOnWeb is a web-based application for interactive and collaborative mission planning. Users can inspect the planning model and view the current timeline state, using customizable plots to view details of interest, and make manual modifications if necessary. Through its client-server architecture, it allows simultaneous work on a shared planning state without needing any manual data exchange. Any changes by one user are distributed in real-time to all others and automatically checked for conflicts, allowing for efficient and flexible workflows in the planning process. The planning model is defined based on our planning library Plains, which provides the functionalities for defining activities and resources with their parameters, dependencies, effects, and constraints.

In most use cases, PintaOnWeb is connected to a planning system based on GSOC's Reactive Planning framework, which implements the automated planning processes invisibly in the background. The system ingests input from other sub-systems, customers, and input provided by users in PintaOnWeb and merges them into a single consistent planning state. For such planning systems, PintaOnWeb is valuable for visualization of the planning results, as well as allowing to manually trigger the execution of planning algorithms.

Besides giving an insight into the current status and functionalities of the tool suite, the presentation will also address some additional aspects, like the support of user authentication by integrating an authentication provider via the OpenID Connect standard. This allows a single instance to serve different user groups, each having their view and edit permissions restricted based on which tasks they need to fulfill. The development process of PintaOnWeb follows agile practices, with an iterative approach that helps us to implement new features based on the users' feedback and missions' needs. It is backed by an automatic pipeline that ensures we always have a running and tested software and allows us to release new versions within minutes. We focus on ensuring that the software is secure by following the BSI guidelines and security best practices.

All in all, PintaOnWeb offers a versatile basis to implement a multitude of use cases. It provides extension points for the user interface, API and algorithms to support mission-specific workflows. Since the planning data is provided by the server via a GraphQL API, it's accessible directly by other applications to query and mutate the planning state. PintaOnWeb is already used for the interactive planning of the upcoming MMX Idefix rover's operations, and timeline inspection of the fully automated planning system for the Earth observation mission EnMAP. For the LEO mission SeRANIS, as well as a GEO communication mission, we apply a distributed planning approach consisting of separate platform and payload planning systems that exchange information. Further future applications include ground station planning, support for the current and perhaps also next generations of the global navigation satellite system Galileo, and many more GSOC projects and missions in the queue.