Background and justification:
ESOC operations spacecraft monitoring systems feature basic filtering and a lack of alarm prioritization capabilities. This makes it difficult for operators to quickly determine the relative importance of notifications, especially for remote (standby) personnel receiving mobile text message (SMS) alerts. Additionally, existing systems do not provide operators with context, necessitating manual debugging steps to determine whether specific alarms should be investigated further. ESOC would benefit from a system offering advanced alarm processing to filter, aggregate, and correlate multiple data sources, making use of modern smartphone technology to display rich information relating to alarms.
Objectives:
This activity builds on the results of a GSTPE1 De-risking activity (completed 2020), which created an AAMS prototype mobile app. This follow-on activity aimed at maturing AAMS through extensive end-to-end verification, implementing the remaining functionality to become a fully featured general-purpose alarm notification software product for space missions, adding a web application for onsite users, and deploying to a pre-operational environment (GAIA mission) to achieve TRL6.
Achievements and status:
An extensive requirements engineering process both within ESOC and with commercial use case stakeholders led to the consolidation of AAMS requirements and design. Special attention was paid to ESOC network security and long-term software maintenance requirements. An extensible generic architecture was implemented to ease interfacing to future deployments and different end users. AAMS can implement complex mission team notification workflows, validates notification rules prior to deployment, and interfaces to multiple ESOC systems to retrieve data and alarm contextual information. Several mission use cases were implemented to demonstrate the available alarm filtering, correlation, fetching of contextual information and interfacing capabilities of AAMS.
Benefits:
AAMS uses Complex Event Processing to detect complex situations by correlating multiple data sources. It offers increased flexibility defining and maintaining monitoring rules. Using a modern mobile app to deliver monitoring notifications provides a rich interface for remote operations monitoring, including contextual information such as Telemetry Parameter plots and Flight Operations Procedures to aid situational awareness.
Next steps:
AAMS is currently being reviewed for operational deployment at ESOC. In addition to use by commercial space operators, possible extension to AIT use cases for managing notifications during satellite qualification testing is being explored as a commercial application.
