Development process for automatically generated plans for satellites control based on UML

Abstract

One of the main causes for the growing demand for satellites controllers and control centers is the increase number of satellites launched from our planet. Some of these needs are supplied by new controllers, but it will soon be a time on which this kind of monitoring will be overtaken by the growing number of satellites to control, without an auto-generated plan process. In this real scenario, it is important to have, before thinking of implementing a planner or even before create a Knowledge Base equipped with meta-models, a development process divided in very well defined steps. Each of these steps must have a target objective to reach and one or more than one software artifacts to generate, using for this techniques in fields like the knowledge acquisition and tools for successful software design, such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML), one of the most significant modeling tool used in commercial systems. A development process for an automatically generated plan, based on the satellite components status, the ground positions stations and its orbit frequency, must be used as soon as possible, in order to grant our capability to safely control all of our satellites. This paper object is to show in full detail the PRODESEA, an auto-generated plan development process useful when a satellite control planning is needed to reach the above goals. For didactic purpose, this paper also illustrates one case study in a satellites control domain.