Promissing Results from the Customization of the Commanding and Monitoring Frameworks of INPE Satellite Control System

Abstract

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.