Abstract:
NASA has recently deployed a new mid-range scheduling system for the antennas of the Deep Space Network (DSN), called Service Scheduling Software, or S³. This system was designed and deployed as a modern web application containing a central scheduling database integrated with a collaborative environment, exploiting the same technologies as social web applications but applied to a space operations context. This is highly relevant to the DSN domain since the network schedule of operations is developed in a peer-to-peer negotiation process among all users of the DSN. These users represent not only NASA’s deep space missions, but also international partners and ground-based science and calibration users. The initial implementation of S³ is complete and the system has been operational since July 2011. This paper describes some key aspects of the S³ system and on the challenges of modeling complex scheduling requirements and the ongoing extension of S³ to encompass long-range planning, downtime analysis, and forecasting, as the next step in developing a single integrated DSN scheduling tool suite to cover all time ranges.
