| The Ground Systems Department has over 30 years experience developing and maintaining planning and scheduling system for manned space activities. |
|
Skylab: 1970-'73 |
Skylab flew in 1973-74. Planning and Scheduling the science activities was done at the Marshall Space Flight Center. It was done on paper without benefit of computers. MSFC developed several experts who later contributed to the "expert system" planning and scheduling computer tools. |
| Spacelab: 1977-'95 |
The planning and scheduling
system for Spacelab science activities went through three generations of
development with the last generation becoming the operational planning and
scheduling system for the science activities on most Spacelab missions.
This in-house program, called the Experiment Scheduling
Program (ESP), was also installed at JSC for use on 2 Spacelab missions
and at Oberpfaffenhofen Germany for 1 Spacelab mission. Several papers were published. During Spacelab several lessons about planning and scheduling were learned. These have been applied to the Nexus system. |
|
Space Station 1995- |
The Ground
System Department built the Payload Planning System (PPS) which had at its
core the "Consolidated Planning System" (CPS) supplied by JSC. (This
was a directive based on cost savings.) One of the components built
in-house by the Ground Systems Department was the requirements collections
program (iURC). This program made innovative extensions to the CPS
modeling schema and also maintained some of the ESP modeling features not
present in CPS. Several papers were published. |
| Research 2002-'03 |
The MSFC center director deemed
this planning and scheduling of sufficient importance to fund a 2-year
research project to develop a new scheduling engine (proposal
presentation). This research was titled "Request-Oriented
Scheduling Environment" (ROSE). The first step was to enhance the
modeling schema developed for Space Station to produce the "maximally
expressive" modeling schema of Nexus. The next step was to develop a
scheduling engine which matched the modeling schema.
Several papers were published. |
|
Nexus 2003- |
A planning and scheduling system was layed out around the ROSE modeling and scheduling engine. In late 2003 a prototype of this system was started. |