Introduction

The PECS project 'Advanced SCOS-20000 Monitoring' covers the Czech part of the ESA combined GSTP/PECS activities 'Advanced Monitoring for a Modern Generic Mission Control System' and 'Consolidation of the Advanced Telemetry Monitoring Subsystem'.

Both ESA projects were performed by Siemens Austria as the main contractor (within the GSTP program) and ANF Data and Siemens Hungary as subcontractors (within PECS CZ and PECS HU programs). The project was finished in August 2008 and there was confirmed the 100% of payments.

The main objective of these two projects was to exploit new technologies for the monitoring and visualization subsystems of the existing ESA mission control system SCOS-2000 and to make use of the outcome of the analysis and prototypes in view of the new European Ground Operation Software architecture (EGOS).

Work packages performed by ANF DATA within the PECS program were:

• CORBA based Packet Distribution Prototype Software
• Command Supervisor for Remote Monitoring and Controlling of SCOS-2000 Command Sources
• EGOS Data Transfer Library (DTL)
• EGOS Data Management Library (DML) - part related to the telecommands

The Command Supervisor and the DTL/DML libraries were presented at the European Ground System Architecture Workshop (ESAW) at ESOC in June 2007.

CORBA based Packet Distribution Prototype Software

The communication infrastructure of the ESA SCOS-2000 software 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. This original solution has been well proved in several missions, but it has the following disadvantages:

• A lot of "low level" program code is required for the implementation
• Heterogeneous system configurations (Solaris/Linux) is not supported
• The data format of the messages is implicitly defined in the program code

The main goal of our task was to analyze existing TCP/IP data packet distribution in the SCOS-2000 Mission Control System and implement a prototype, in which the native TCP/IP packet distribution is replaced by means of the CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture).

The overall ESA project started in December 2005, the final CORBA based Packet Distribution Prototype was delivered to ESA in July 2006.

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

The Command Supervisor is a new SCOS-2000 sub-system which enables operators to monitor all commanding activities, regardless whether they are located on or off-site. It collects the state of all command sources in the system and distributes this information to all interested parties.

The Command Supervisor is based on the client-server model. The server collects data from the SCOS-2000 command source applications via a CORBA interface, and transfers this data via CORBA to the Command Supervisor client. The client displays requested commanding data, and also enables operations such as filtering and sorting.

This work package started in December 2005; the final version of the Command Supervisor was delivered to ESA in March 2007.

EGOS Data Transfer Library

The Data Transfer Library (DTL) is a new EGOS software library supporting transfer of structured data between end points in a platform independent way. The following services are supported:

• point to point timely - old data are discarded during the transfer
• point to point complete - all data are delivered
• broadcast/multicast

The library is designed in a generic way, so that it can be tailored to specific transfer data units and can be easily extended for new data types.

This work package started in March 2006; the final version of the DTL was delivered to ESA in July 2008.

EGOS Data Management Library

The Data Management Library (DML) is a new EGOS software library responsible for management of telemetry and telecommand data (TM/TC) received from EGOS applications in form of annotated data stream, frames, and packets.

In this work package only the TC related part of DML implementation was assigned to ANF DATA as the PECS activity. The software requirements, architectural design, and DML TM implementation were performed by Siemens Austria within the GSTP program.

The main functions of the DML TC are:

• TC packet operations; providing methods to set the various items in a TC packet
• TC data units operations; providing methods to encode packets and assemble segments, frames, and CLTUs
• Create EGOS TC objects from SCOS-2000 TC Packets
• Create SCOS-2000 TC Packets from EGOS TC objects
• Create CCSDS TC Packets from SCOS-2000 TC Packets
• Create CCSDS TC Segments from CCSDS TC Packets
• Create CCSDS CLTUs from CCSDS TC Segments
• Read ASCII-MIB data (as used in for example SCOS-2000)
• Process TC Parameters: Perform range checks, compare values, and convert data types.

This work package started in April 2007; the final version of the DML was delivered to ESA in July 2008.

For more information, please, contact e-mail fuchsczechspace.cz.