The Incremental Planning System – GSOC’s Next Generation Mission Planning Framework

Kurzfassung

The paper at hand presents the new generic framework for automated planning and scheduling in future mission planning systems developed at GSOC (German Space Operations Center). It evolved from the experiences made in past and current projects and the evaluation of internal and external requirements for upcoming projects. In customary systems such as the one used within GSOC’s TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X mission, succeeding planning runs to combine all collected input to a consistent, conflict-free command timeline take place at fix, dedicated points in time, e.g. twice a day. In contrast and as a main difference, with the new system each new input is processed immediately and so a consistent up-to-date timeline is maintained at all times. We show that this approach provides a set of important advantages and new possibilities for spacecraft commanding and user satisfaction. For example, uplink schedules can be flexibly modified due to short-term notifications, or up-to-date, extensive information about the planning state is always available, which means that conflicts can be seen before finally submitting a new request and, if applicable, can be resolved by selecting a suggested solution scenario. The presented system constitutes a generic tool suite which is scalable in performance critical areas, which is configurable to various mission scenarios and which defines a dedicated set of interfaces, specifying the functionality that remains to be implemented by each individual project. The declared goal is that all upcoming GSOC missions will benefit from using the Incremental Planning framework in terms of cost reduction, implementation duration and system robustness.