The ground control of the third and fourth China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellites (CBERS 3 and 4) will be carried out by a new system under development at INPE. This system will include new technologies to reduce costs and development time of future ground system projects, through shared or adaptable software. Taking advantage of the experience gained in earlier ground control systems, the entities related to satellite operations activities have been modeled as metadata. This modeling approach will increase the systems´s reusability, reducing the efforts required to make changes. Whenever modeling costs of entities via metadata have been become unfeasible, their programming interfaces have been defined by Design Patterns in order to facilitate future changes. Furthermore, the telecommand and telemetry subsystems architecture includes a processing kernel, which can be shared with EGSE and satellite simulation software. This architecture also foresees the inclusion of CCSDS communication link protocols in other INPE satellite missions. In the future, this system will be upgraded to include Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, like Planning, to prepare flight operation plans for the routine phase of the missions. The engineers in charge of planning the satellite operations will use tools developed with Dynamic Object Model technology to define the operations activities. Through the high-level script language supplied by these tools, the engineers will be able to define and/or change the knowledge database of operations activities, without requiring specific software development for each satellite. In addition, these tools will make it easier to define planning goals and to edit existing planning to deal with non-routine operations activities. The operations plan will have actions that are automatically executed by the system, as well as actions that are manually executed by human operators. This paper presents the modeling of the operations entities to increase the satellite control system´s reusability and provide software that may be used by the control center, testing (EGSE), and simulation systems. This paper also shows how the Dynamic Object Model and AI technologies will be added to the system in order to automate the control center operations, thereby reducing operations cost.
Research of automatic solutions for space operations is a real need for all space agencies in order to reduce space mission costs. Nowadays, a significant parcel of satellite operation activities at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) is still performed manually. Thus, finding automated alternatives for the satellite operation activities at INPE is of capital importance, in order to maintain the currently satisfactory performance of these activities, despite the scarcity of financial resources. This paper proposes the architecture of an Intelligent Planning System for the automatic generation of satellite flight operation plans (PlanIPOV). The proposed system employs temporal planning techniques of artificial intelligence (IA) in the automatic flight operation plans (FOP) generation for a satellite routine operational phase, with the aim of opening the way toward a higher degree of automation for satellite operation activities of INPE. The main reason for the application of the planning system in the routine operational phase of the satellite lifespan is that this phase is composed of very repetitive and well defined tasks which have lower programming costs. In addition, this phase is the longest comprising practically the entire lifespan of the satellite. The PlanIPOV system uses the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL2.2) to model the knowledge base of INPE satellite operations. It is based on the automatic generation of problem files, i.e., the initial state of the satellite control environment and the goal to be reached by executing the generated FOP timeline. The system uses information extracted from the following files: tracking knowledge domain; prediction of future satellite passes of the involved ground stations; and configuration parameters of the satellites and the ground stations. This paper also presents a prototype of the proposed planning system. This prototype was implemented using the PDDL2.2 language and LPG-TD planner (Local Search for Planning Graphs -Time Initial Literal and Derived Predicates). It was tested for the tracking domain of the satellites currently being controlled by INPE (SCD1, SCD2 and CBERS2). These results are presented along with the limitations that have been observed in the planning technique application. The solutions adopted to overcome these limitations are outlined. The obtained results may be considered satisfactory.
The Commanding and Monitoring frameworks are two fundamental stones of the SATellite Control System (SATCS) architecture at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE). They consist of a set of integrated classes which provide a pre-defined base infrastructure to support the development of applications for the remote control and monitoring domains. These domains include controlling and monitoring functions for both satellites and ground stations. These frameworks permit creating applications that could achieve a high level of software reuse with a lower development cost. In order to reach these targets, the following concepts have been widely used in the design: design-patterns, component-base development, and metadata. Recently, some software products have been created using the two frameworks and the promising results from their developing processes show that the objectives of maximizing reuse and decreasing costs have been achieved. In a short time while using a small group of developers two software applications were developed for the team that was testing the engineering model of the fourth China Brazil Earth Research Satellite (CBERS3): TMTCAIT (kernel functions for telecommand and telemetry processing) and CBERS3AOCSTC (decoding of AOCS telecommand binary files). The application DSSCOP1CTX to study the use of the CCSDS COP1 protocol for sending telecommands through the CORTEX baseband equipment has also been developed. The use of the frameworks and metadata were not the only reasons, taking into account the small staff and short deadlines, for the success in implementing these products. The reuse of the testing infrastructure of the frameworks and its validation process were also decisive. They have been created to validate the frameworks and had an important role in decreasing the effort for validating these three products and proved to be another important dimension of reuse.
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