Mission Planning Systems
“Mission Planning” is the discipline of the space sector that is in charge of assigning and optimizing the resources available in a system taking care of user's requests and solving the conflicts between the different resources. In other words, given a finite set of resources and having to make a series of tasks, the aim is to look for a plan that fulfils all the restrictions of the system, the number of executed tasks is maximized and the consumption of resources does not exceed the resources available. A resource can be any element of the system, i.e. the time of instrument use, the capacity of a memory, the number of bytes that can be sent by a network, etc.
The “Mission Planning” systems are very complex software systems as much in their design as in their accomplishment. Normally, they are specifically designed for a mission since each mission counts on a set of different resources, restrictions, rules of planning, etc.
The objective of these systems is to help the satellite operators to plan the operations that must make the satellite. The satellite systems are more and more powerful and complex, and so it is necessary to use automatic aid tools so that operators can make their work quickly and with GREATER reliability.
These systems are usually based on techniques and algorithms of Artificial intelligence. These algorithms are used to create a plan of between all the million possible combinations of tasks in such way that the use of the resources maximizes and there is no conflict.
The “Mission Planning” systems can be of different types according to the type of plan that ARE GOING to generate: Planning the operations that must make the instruments of a satellite. Planning the manoeuvres and operations of a satellite.
Planning the operations of the earth station; antenna, equipment, communications networks, etc. Normally, the generated plans are visualize by means of a Gantt chart where the tasks to make, the order, if there is overlapping, if there are conflicts, etc are. It's the visual part of the system.