Name of Group | 2.07 Mission Planning And Scheduling | Area | Mission Operations and Information Management Services Area (MOIMS) | Chairperson | Mehren Sarkarati | Chairperson E-Mail Address | mehran.sarkarati@esa.int | Chairperson Agency | ESA | Deputy Chairperson | Steve Chien | Deputy Chairperson E-Mail Address | steve.chien@jpl.nasa.gov | Deputy Chairperson Agency | NASA | Mailing List | moims-mp@mailman.ccsds.org | Scope of Activity | Mission Planning is an activity that often requires interaction between multiple agencies or organisations. This may be to support collaboration between missions, or to allow tasking of payloads by multiple end-users. Some spacecraft may host multiple payloads, potentially from different agencies, and each with an associated Principal Investigator. Other missions, such as observatories, make a single payload instrument available to a wider user community. Mission Planning itself may be distributed between different organisations and in the future some planning responsibility may be delegated to the spacecraft itself. Currently such interoperable interfaces are defined on a per-mission basis.
The Scope of the proposed activity is to define standard CCSDS Mission Planning services, focussing on two aspects:
• The submission of Planning Requests (input to Mission Planning)
• The distribution of Plans/Schedules (output of Mission Planning)
Initial emphasis of the working group will be placed on the specification of the Mission Planning and Scheduling Information Model in form of standardised messages, which are typically exchanged between organisations to support these interfaces. As many organisations exchange such information today through file based communication, the working group shall ensure that the specified Mission Planning and Scheduling Information is generic enough and does not preclude the usage of files for the exchange of the specified messages.
For this purpose the working group shall start with the analysis of current common practices and existing mission planning and scheduling file formats, which are currently in use in the participating agencies. Special focus shall be given to analysis of the mission planning and scheduling file formats, which are currently in use by multi-agency missions with existing cross agency planning scenarios. The analysis shall however be focused and limited to the mission planning and scheduling information, which pertains to the mission planning boundaries: Planning Request files (input), Plan and Schedule files (output).
In the medium-term it is intended to specify the interaction of the involved entities, through standardisation of service-based interfaces that define the dynamic interaction between software applications that are providers and consumers of these services. It is recognised that for this to be possible, the initial specification of Mission Planning and Scheduling messages should be “service aware” to allow the message formats to be re-used in the context of service-based interactions.
In this context, it is important to emphasise that the working group believes the main challenges and difficulties pertains to the first task, i.e. the specification of the actual Mission Planning and Scheduling Information Model, regardless of if the corresponding information is transferred via files or through messages of corresponding service interfaces. Hence the focus of the work and majority of the effort shall be dedicated to this task. Once the syntax and the semantic of the messages to be exchanged is formalised, the specification of the corresponding services for their exchange shall be straight forward and a natural conclusion.
For the specification of the Mission Planning and Scheduling Information Model and the related services, the WG shall identify and document (in the green book?) the relevant scenarios, use cases and deployment architectures. This is to ensure that the resulting Information Model and Services are practical, useful and compliant to the existing operational concepts, organisational constraints and security directives of the participating agencies.
As Ground station and network planning is an important aspect of the overall space mission planning and scheduling, it is important to clarify the scope of the work of the Mission Planning and Scheduling WG and its relationship to other CCSDS Working Groups such as the CSS WG. The planning and scheduling of the ground stations and the network is not in the scope of the envisage Mission Planning and Scheduling services of this WG. As Mission Planning will in many cases interface with Ground Station Planning, the Information Model, specified by this WG must however respect such interfaces.
The CCSDS SM&C working group has specified a generic, service oriented framework for Mission Operations (MO). With the publication of the CCSDS Mission Operations Message Abstraction Layer (MAL) [CCSDS 521.0-B-2] and the CCSDS Mission Operations Common Object Model (COM) [CCSDS 521.1-B-1] blue books, the foundation of the MO service oriented framework has been established. Domain specific information models and the corresponding mission operation services for their exchange, such as Mission Planning services, can now be specified as Common Object Model data entities and MO-compliant services by the respective domain experts in an implementation and communication agnostic manner. One of the objectives of the Common Object Model, is to allow establishing interrelationship between data entities from different Mission Operation Services. In the context of the Mission Planning and Scheduling this means, for instance, to be able to answer questions such as: The value of Parameter X has changed to A, due to the Event Y, which has been triggered on board the spacecraft due to the execution of the Command Z, which has been part of Schedule S, which pertains to Plan P, which included the Planning Request R, …
A green book shall be produced to outline the underlying Mission Planning Services concept.
The actual Mission Planning and Scheduing messages and services shall be specified in one or more blue books. The final list of the Mission Planning services for the blue books shall be identified by the working group and described in the green book. The current proposed list is: Planning Request Service (including associated Planning Request Status Tracking), Plan/Schedule Distribution Service (including associated Execution Status feedback), with initial focus on the specification of Planning Request and Plan/Schedule Distribution messages as XML-based files.
| Rationale for Activity | Mission Planning and Scheduling is an integral part of overall space mission operations. It encompasses work in preparation before the execution of commands (also often referred to as off-line planning) as well as the immediate work to automation systems on the ground and on-board (be it the traditional on-board schedule or more advanced on-board automation systems). In this regard, Mission Planning and Scheduling Information Model and Services are closely linked to other Mission Operation Services such as commanding, monitoring, on-board queue management and automation services as well as to the information model of navigation services and ground station and network planning and scheduling.
The SM&C working group is currently specifying the first set of domain specific services, starting with those, which pertain directly to the monitoring and control of spacecraft, the so-called MO M&C services. At the same time the SM&C working group has reached out to other CCSDS Working Groups and domain experts to promote the specification of their domain specific services as new MO services. This has included the navigation, mission planning and telerobotics operations domains.
An initial list of envisaged Mission Operations services is outlined in the MO Services Concept green book (CCSDS 520.0-G-3). As it can be seen in the referenced list, mission planning and scheduling services have been among the envisaged candidate Mission Operation services at the foundation of the Mission Operations concept.
In this context, two dedicated technical meetings where held during two CCSDS meetings in Europe and in the US, which received active participation of a large community of planning domain experts from different planning agencies and organisations involved in mission operations. The first meeting took place as part of the CCSDS Technical Meeting held in Darmstadt, Germany in April 2012. 58 mission planning specialists attended the meeting, mostly from Europe [Ref-1]. A second session was held during CCSDS Technical Meeting in Cleveland, Ohio in 2012, with similar attendance mainly from US experts [Ref-2].
Despite differences in planning application domains and a diversity of expert views, a consensus quickly emerged at both meetings as follows:
• The lack of standardised services for exchange of planning data among different entities involved in mission planning scenarios was generally recognised;
• It was acknowledged by the participants that this identified lack of standardised mission planning services lead to the invention of new format and exchange mechanisms for each planning application domain and potentially for each deployment (e.g. for each mission);
• There has been a general agreement that standardising mission planning services would accordingly reduce effort (hence cost) in both software development as well as mission operation domains, by simplifying the integration of distributed mission planning and wider mission operations systems.
• With regard to the approach for specifying standardised mission planning services, it was recommended to start with a so-called black-box approach, where the planning functionality is considered as a black box. The focus shall be accordingly on specifying the operational interfaces for exchange of related planning information items.
• With regard to the scope of the respective services the recommendation has been to start simple, i.e. focus initially on the Planning Request, Plan Result Exchange and Scheduling services rather than attempting to address the more complex problem of exchanging planning constraints and other configuration data;
• Harmonisation of terminology was considered equally important;
[Ref-3] elaborates in more detail on the outcome of the discussions and the conclusions of the technical meetings. A draft concept paper on CCSDS MO Mission Planning Services [Ref-4] was prepared in advance of the Cleveland meeting.
A Mission Planning BOF session was held at the CCSDS Fall 2014 Technical Meeting in London. The need for standardisation of Mission Planning and Scheduling interactions between organisations and systems was generally acknowledged by the BOF. The participants concluded that majority of the effort of the envisaged Working Group shall be focused on and priority shall be given to the definition of the underlying Mission Planning and Scheduling Information Model in form of standardised message formats for Planning Requests and Plan/Schedule Distribution. It was felt that specifying the Planning and Scheduling Information Model in a transport agnostic manner would provide immediate benefit for interoperability, as the resulting messages could be exchanged through file-based communication protocols. This would allow an early adoption of the results of the Mission Planning and Scheduling Working Group within the current file-based deployment architectures.. It was also accepted that any such definition of message formats should be done in a “service-aware” manner to enable their re-use within the subsequent standardisation of service-based interfaces. | Goals | The initial goals of the Mission Planning Services Working Group are:
a) develop an "MO Mission Planning and Scheduling Concept" in the Green Book.
b) Formally specify the Mission Planning and Scheduling Information Model and Services in blue
| Survey of Similar Standards Efforts Undertaken in
Other Bodies and elsewhere in CCSDS | ESA has current activities providing draft mission planning service specifications, which they would like to bring as an input to the WG:
• Specification of Generic Mission Planning Services: Results of the work done by the industry in the context of a dedicated activity as part of the ESA PECS programme.
• Specification of Mission Planning Services for NetSat: Results of the work to be performed in the context of a PhD. NPI contract between ESA and University of Würzburg | Patent Licensing Applicability for Future Standards | There are NO known patent license issues. | Technical Risk Mitigation Strategy | The involvement of Mission Planning domain experts from the participating agencies will ensure that the Mission Planning Services Working Group will be able to meet its stated goals.
The initial focus on specifying the Mission Planning and Scheduling Information model in form of message exchange formats (which could also be done via file-exchange) allows the quick adoption of the WG results, within current (often file based) cross-agency deployment architectures.
The involvement of Mission Planning domain experts from the participating agencies will ensure that the Mission Planning Services Working Group will be able to meet its stated goals.
The initial focus on specifying the Mission Planning and Scheduling Information model in form of message exchange formats (which could also be done via file-exchange) allows the quick adoption of the WG results, within current (often file based) cross-agency deployment architectures. | Management Risk Mitigation Strategy | Resources already committed by ESA and UKSA are sufficient to defined two projects. |
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