Planning and scheduling services to support facility management in the ISS

The "USOCs Knowledge Integration and dissemination for Space Science Experimentation" (Ulisse) is a project (funded by HU and indicated by REA as example of successful FP7 project in the Space field) whose objective is data valorization around the ISS experiments. Each USOC (User Support and Operation Centres) is responsible for a particular on-board facility that is to be operated to perform scientific experiments and to generate the related scientific data. One of the main problems that the USOC engineers have to tackle in their daily activities is the synthesis and management of the experiment plans which originate from the requests of the ESA Principal Investigators (PI) and that will have to be approved by the Columbus European Planning Team (EPT) during a phase called Increment Planning Process, and eventually executed on board the scientific facility controlled by the USOC. This work presents the Planning and Scheduling Service (Pss), i.e., the specific service that has been implemented in the context of the Ulisse project to support USOCs efforts during the Increment Planning Process. Such service aims at supporting the automatic definition of activity schedules for scientific payloads, consistently with respect to a set of identified requirements and constraints. In particular. The Pss has been developed and integrated in the Ulisse platform in order to support data production capabilities around the ISS activities. Copyright © (2012) by the International Astronautical Federation.