Automatic Generation of Telemetry Display
Benjamin F. Breyer, Gilles Picart, Jacques Troillard, Cédric Battut · 2018 SpaceOps Conference · 2018
Displaying telemetry data is essential to have a clear and synthetic view of a spacecraft health status.Alphanumeric pages, synoptic displays or graphs are available on any space project.The development process of such display means is the result of a fruitful collaboration between the Flight Control Teams (FCT) and spacecraft experts.Up to now however, it has resulted from a manual process which is most of the time very time consuming... especially for the FCT!Because of the lack of time on a recent remote sensing spacecraft project, there was an imperative need for an innovative process to speed up the TM display generation.Two axes of improvement were considered to achieve this goal.The first idea was to standardize the TM display creation and to canalize the requirements coming from the experts.This new, straightforward process is based on an Excel WYSIWYG requirement file which helps the experts to have a clear mind of what they want to see in a display before it is processed by the FCT.There is an Excel workbook for each equipment or topic and an Excel sheet for each synoptic or graph.Links between two data displays can be set thanks to simple Excel hyperlinks.The second idea was to automate the synoptic generation by translating the requirements into actual visual objects thanks to a Python program.The software used to build data displays on this mission is JSynoptic, which is embedded in the Open Center product line from Airbus Defence and Space.Visual objects are described as XML files containing the definition of all included graphical widgets.The details useful to build these objects are extracted by the FCT from the Excel sheet into descriptive text files whose syntax is based on less than ten keywords.Other pieces of information, such as the designation, the unit or the transfer function of telemetry parameters, are collected directly from the spacecraft data base in order to secure the data retrieval.This new generation process has been used to create more than one hundred displays for the first spacecraft of the constellation.It has proved very efficient and helped to converge much quicker than on previous programs towards a smart set of homogeneous telemetry displays.Over 90% of the whole library has benefited from automatic generation and time spent on telemetry displays was divided almost by 10.This paper describes in details the generation process and gives some lessons learned from the first application onto a CNES program.