Full scheduling of the CCC operations: POPS

Abstract

For many years, for each phase of a mission (Launch and Early Operations Phase (LEOP), Safe Hold Mode (SHM) recovery ...), all operations of CNES satellites had been driven by a specific excel Sequence Of Events (SOE) produced for this phase. All operations teams had to prepare manually their own plans (TeleCommands (TC) for board team, Ground Control Procedure (GCP) scheduling for flight dynamics and ground teams...) according to this SOE with potential human errors. In order to improve this situation, a piece of software called POPS (Planification des OPerations Satellites) has been developed by the operational teams. It allows to produce a Sequence Of Operations (SOO) describing operations to be performed at the Command Control Center (CCC) system level, whatever the mission phase (LEOP, SHM, routine, End Of Life (EOL)...) and to generate coherent operational products such as the SOE or time tagged (TTG) TC plans. To meet this objective, the activities that must be conducted are defined through rules written in an “operational” language. These rules may be assimilated as a software translation of the Flight Operations Plan (FOP) documents. When needed, rules corresponding to the mission phase are instantiated with the current context in order to produce a SOO covering all operational tasks. It is then possible to create the operational products required to operate the mission. The paper will first present the main concept of POPS and its major features. The second part will focus on some operational use cases: PROTEUS, MYRIADE and PLEIADES missions. It will present in a third part, a feed-back including main advantages and operational impacts and then to conclude, some recommendations on the way to deal with this scheduling domain.