Design of a Deep Space Network Scheduling Application
Bradley J. Clement, Mark Johnston · 2006
The Deep Space Network (DSN) is a collection of ground antennas used to provide communication services for space missions at and beyond Earth. Currently, nearly 30 people work full time to schedule 61 missions over a ten year horizon using a few disconnected tools. The large manual and collaborative effort to generate schedules and resolve conflicts has spurred an effort to build a new scheduling application incorporating automated scheduling. We will describe the basic design of this application, the Service Scheduling Subsystem (SSS), and discuss some of the design issues. We describe the messaging interface to the automated scheduler, including the request and constraint language and support for user-defined constraints. There are many other features that we believe will heavily influence the success of the application. These include an efficient schedule editing interface, request management, non-interfering suggestions from automated scheduling, user-defined alerts, hypothetical schedules, and automated negotiation.