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Abstmct-Anticipated growth in demand for NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) and its services has created a need to streamline the delivery of telecommunications services. The process for scheduling services is a key component of the interface between mission customers requesting telecommunication support for their spacecraft and DSN providers managing the ground system (antennas). The scheduling process can be viewed as a reservation system for reserving tracking time (known as "tracks") for space missions.The current scheduling process has evolved into a complex, assembly line operation in which different paper-based, file based, and manual systems are used to pass the schedule between different organizations. A variety of different and often arcane formats of the schedule are maintained in accordance with each organization's needs. As a result, mission customers are confronted with a complicated process requiring high levels of direct communication (phone, facsimile, email) and extensive conflict resolution meetings. As tracking reservations approach real-time operation, it is common for last minute schedule changes to require significant rework and new data support products while remote DSN Complexes must adapt to the changes. This paper describes an operations concept for electronic scheduling and software interface for organizations to extract required views of the schedule. Advantages include widespread accessibility to a common schedule document, virtually instantaneous distribution of new schedule releases, and the ability of missions to perform conflict resolution off-line without time-consuming meetings.The operations concept and e-scheduling tool are under development and testing for three scheduling organizations within the Telecommunications and Mission Operations Directorate at JPL.Observations relevant to the deployment of an e-scheduling operations concept are described.

A set of analysis tools has been created in a community-based team environment to support NASA ground resource allocation and planning. This new tool, called GRAPE (Ground Resource Allocation and Planning Environment), combines analysis, monitoring, and search capabilities into an existing community environment where wikis, blogs, document libraries, calendars, discussion forums, lists, progress management, and email repositories are available in a web site which assists users with their communication, operation, analysis, and collaboration needs. Keywords-resource management; planning; Internet I. OBJECTIVESSocial networking has been very successful in the Web 2.0 era. In large organizations, it facilitates communication and team collaboration among distributed groups. The resource allocation process in NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) has increasing needs for resource allocation and scheduling collaboration in various stakeholder organizations. A community-based environment helps to address domain issues such as team communication and knowledge sharing. However, it does not address daily analysis needs. Users still require separate tools for daily work ranging from operations and analysis to status monitoring and reporting. In order to provide a complete and working team environment, these capabilities need to be integrated into a single social application, so team members can conduct daily business and share information efficiently. Thus, analysis and operation tools must be developed and seamlessly integrated into this collaborative web environment to maximize its effectiveness. These tools must also link to visualization components and be conveniently accessible through a browser in common operating systems. A collaborative team portal is a one stop environment for team communication, operation, data analysis, workspace monitoring, knowledge sharing, information discovery, linkage to existing services, and visualization. This can simplify work processes and deployment while reducing development and maintenance costs. Users are empowered to create content (including web sites) and managers can manage access permissions without the involvement of system administrators. Figure 1 depicts the objectives of the Ground Resource Allocation and Planning Environment (GRAPE) to provide analysis, monitoring, information, search, and collaboration all in one single team portal. Figure 1. The objectives of GRAPE II. DESCRIPTION OF THE RESEARCH, ENGINEERING, OR OPERATIONS APPROACHThe goal of GRAPE is to integrate analysis and operation capabilities into a team collaboration environment so that users can perform their work and stay connected in the same environment. In order to achieve this goal, a collaborative team environment was adopted as a basis for developing and adding analysis and operations capabilities. A. Team collaboration environmentJPL's Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) recently adopted Microsoft SharePoint 2007 as one of the components in its institutional team collaboration space, called Collab...