Flight Control Monitoring

Traditionally, the flight control is conducted from a central, completely separated Center of Flight Operation which is without any direct or indirect connection with the outside world. New communication and Internet technologies open new possibilities of a remote tracking which utilizes such technical solutions like Internet/Web application or, GSM/Personal Digital Assistant (DPA). The possibilities of such technologies and new features of the non-space monitoring systems (as SCADA, for example) caused expanding requirements to open the Flight Control Systems also to external and remote users. On the other hand it implicates more requirements on parameters (more users connected to a server) so that the operational parameters are becoming very important, especially when large amount of data is transmitted. Also, such a system requires communication and computing technologies which support the new remotely monitoring equipment as PDA. In both cases the new communication and computing technological solutions are the crucial item.

The main goal of this project is to propose a design which is already tested  in prototypes and which creates a basis for its implementation into a fully operational system. More to that, the project output will match the requirements of commercial satellite operators and the competitive strength of common European Flight Control System will be improved.

The project should reach the following goals:

- To provide an analysis how the new communication technologies can be used for achievement of an optimal ration between the operating power and the reliability of the satellite tracking systems. 

- In the second step the results of the analysis will be used for the definition of a new design of the monitoring sub-system for the ESA Mission Control SCOS-2000.

- To provide an analysis how the new communication and computing technologies can be used for a facilitation of the connection between the server of the Central Flight Control System and remote users done on the basis of the GSM/PDA technology. Depending on the results obtained the design of the monitoring sub-system for SCOS-2000 will be modified.

- Because the crucial item is the employment of appropriate computing technique a possibility to replace the TCP/IP connection by the CORBA type will be analyzed. In the following step the MCS Flight Control System will be modified.

- Suitable interface for the control of monitoring client (which can run on PDA) will be designed. 

- All the results will be supported by prototypes at different level of the operational qualification.

Siemens Austria supposes that the whole project will be materialized by two sub-contractors : ANF-DATA (Czech Republic) which is held liable for the monitoring telemetry sub-system based on Homogenous CORBA technology and Siemens PSE (Hungary) which will develop mobile extension for control center. Expenses will be covered by PECS and GSTP program of ESA.

Principal Investigator   :  Helena Kalenska

Address                       :  ANF-DATA

                                       Pujmanove 1221/8 , 140 00 Prague 4

                                       stepan.kotva@siemens.com

The project was finished in August 2008.

WORKING PLAN 

WP-4000 "High performance interface of Java based Graphical User Interfaces with SCOS-2000 processing models with Java Native Interface"

Background / Summary activity description:
Future missions will develop an ever-increasing demand for performing key tasks in a distributed fashion, enabling remote users to interact on-line in a complementary way with the operations staff in the Mission Control Centre. In the area of Mission Control not many attempts have been undertaken so far to adopt web-enabled applications written in Java — a technology well established in many other fields.
The objective of this activity is to add such functionality to ESA’s Mission Control System SCOS-2000, while at the same time avoiding disadvantages of Java applications regarding performance. This shall be achieved by developing a Java Native Interface (JNI) based implementation for increased performance, which can share a part of the already existing processing implementations.

Objective
The concept will be demonstrated for a selected subset of existing SCOS-2000 Operator Applications, with a major focus on benchmarking this implementation in respect to the existing SCOS-2000 applications which are written in native C++ and based on the GUI tool-set ILOG Views.

The following tasks are foreseen:

• Selection of SCOS-2000 GUI application(s), where the concept shall be demonstrated. Such applications should be “fat clients”, where data processing and visualization is inside the same process. Most of the SCOS-2000 GUI applications are implemented in this way.
• Definition of a Java Native Interface between the data processing part and the visualization part. The data processing part shall be reused for the new architecture; the data visualization part shall be replaced.
• Implementation of the Java Native Interface. The Java data types used in the interface have to be mapped to the corresponding C++ types of SCOS-2000.
• Implementation of a Java GUI on top of the Java Native Interface. The reference for the GUI layout will be the original ILOGviews based MMI.
• Performance tests to compare the original SCOS-2000 application and the hybrid JNI application. The hybrid application should have a performance, which is sufficient for operational use.
• Performance tests to compare the hybrid Java application with a similar client/server application. The CORBA based provision services together with the remote Java client can be used therefore.

WP-5000 "Command Supervisor for Remote Monitoring and Controlling of SCOS-2000 Command Sources"

Background / Summary activity description:
Co-ordination of commanding activities is of paramount importance in Mission Control, yet still difficult to achieve with the currently operational infrastructure: the Video Distribution System (VDS). In the style of a telephone switchboard an operator can instruct the VDS to display the content of one of the three screens of any other operator. Important parts hidden by other windows on the screen are therefore unavailable to inspection by other operators, and remote operators are completely excluded.

In this activity a web-based system will be developed, which enables operators to monitor all commanding activities, regardless whether they are located on-site or off-site. The Command Supervisor Server collects system wide the state of all command sources and distributes this information to Web Clients. Each client displays the stack status of selected command sources with optional filter capability. In addition it allows to take control over a command source and to send commands.

Objective:
The architecture for the system will use the CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) technology, which allows processes distributed over a network to communicate with each other. Web technology (HTML, HTTP) is used to distribute the client program to a remote location outside the mission control system.

The following work packages are foreseen to build the application:

1. Enhancing of the SCOS-2000 commanding sources with an interface for retrieving the status of the command stack and for controlling the stack.

This activity shall be based on the Commanding Consolidation work for SCOS-2000, where the SCOS-2000 command sources are unified with a common commanding model. When using this architecture, all required modifications can be focused on the common commanding model. The related tasks are:

• Definition of a CORBA interface for the provision of the stack status
• Implementation of the interface in the common command model
• Implementation of a test environment

 

2.      Development of a Web based infrastructure for distributing the status of the command sources and to coordinate administration requests.

A common CORBA based distribution server will be required, where all command sources are connected. The server bundles the status information from the command sources and forwards this info to the remote operator. If the remote engineer wants to take over control of a command source then the activity requests are routed to the corresponding command source. The related development tasks are:

• Definition of an interface for remote command status provision.
• Definition of an interface for remote source control, including security aspects
• Definition of the filter logic required for the status filtering.
• Implementation of the distribution server.
• Implementation of a test environment.

 

3.     Development of a client for the remote engineer
The status information is visualized for the remote engineer on the graphical user interface (GUI) of a Web client. The client will be implemented in Java to allow the distribution of the client program as Java applet inside a Web page. Development of the client requires the following tasks:

• Definition of a user interface for command source status display.
• Definition of a user interface for remote control of command sources.
• Implementation of the user interfaces.
• Implementation of the communication layer to the distribution server.

 

WP-6000 "Telemetry Desktop for SCOS-2000 based on Java Component Technology"

Background / Summary activity description:
The existing SCOS-2000 Telemetry Desktop is based on an operations concept defined many years ago. Only minor improvements in the usability have been implemented during the evolution of this application. In the meantime more modern MMI applications are used in the space domain and the SCOS-2000 telemetry desktop is the most interesting candidate for new visualisation concepts.

The “old” telemetry desktop makes a clear distinction between the following types of displays:

· Alphanumeric Displays

The telemetry data in alphanumeric displays (AND) are displayed in textual for as telemetry parameter tables.

· Graphical Displays

The telemetry data in graphical displays (GRD) are displayed as curves. The parameter values are drawn either against a time scale or against the value of another parameter.

· Scrolling Displays

The telemetry data in scrolling displays (SCR) are displayed in textual form as scrolling list. The history of the parameters in the scrolling area has a depth of 28 values.

· MIMICs Displays

The telemetry data in mimics displays are visualised via graphical elements. The user can compose the displays out standard elements.

· Telemetry Query Displays

The telemetry query display (TQD) allows to display all relevant aspects of a single telemetry parameter.

The new desktop shall allow the user to define private types of displays, where alphanumeric, graphical, scrolling and mimics information can be mixed. A modular approach shall be used to define a hierarchy of building blocks, where more complex elements contain more primitive elements.

The component technology of Java – called Java Beans – gives the ideal baseline to define reusable MMI elements. The definition of displays created with Java Beans can be saved to files in XML format and re-constructed out of these XML files.

Objective:
A Java based telemetry client will be developed, which communicates via CORBA with the SCOS-2000 servers. The following tasks are foreseen:

• Evaluation of Java tools for manipulating Java Beans. Open Source tools will be the primary candidates for the verification.
• Evaluation of the XML conversion for Java Beans. The basic mechanism is already supported by the Java framework, but some adapdations are expected to make the saving and loading of display definitions user friendly
• Definition of a Java API, which shall be used by the beans to retrieve telemetry data. The API shall support dynamic telemetry data for live and retrieval as well as static information, which comes out of the SCOS-2000 MIB.
• Definition of the client architecture. The overall architecture shall support the display definition task and the runtime use of the system.
• Implementation of the client.
• Testing of the client. In a fist step some example displays will be defined, which will be verified during runtime in a second step.
• Verification of the usability

WP-7000 "Homogenous CORBA based Telemetry Monitoring Subsystem for SCOS-2000"

Background / Summary activity description:
The communication infrastructure of SCOS-2000 has its roots in the packet distribution framework of SCOS-II. The concept has been enhanced during the evolution of the SCOS-II / SCOS-2000 Mission Control System, but the communication technology is still based on native TCP/IP. The advantage is, that this is well proved in several missions.

The packet distribution framework has beside several advantages also some disadvantages:

• A lot of “low level” program code is required for the implementation
• heterogeneous system configurations are not supported (e.g. some processes on Solaris / Sparc, others on Linux / Intel)
• the data format of the messages is implicitly defined in the program code

The proposed activity in this work package is to explore a possible harmonisation of the architecture based on the use of CORBA to avoid the disadvantages of native TCP/IP.