Benefits of using Advanced Planning and Scheduling Technology: The Alphasat TDP Operations case

In July 2013, Alphasat, Europes largest and most sophisticated telecommunications satellite, was launched from Kourou, French Guiana. In addition to its main commercial payload, four Technology Demonstration Payloads (TDPs) fly on-board. These payloads are provided by different research institutes, which are in charge of defining in-orbit demonstration tests of these new technologies. Therefore, to optimize this opportunity, coordination of possibly conflicting payload operations is required. This is one of the roles of the TDP ESA Coordination Office (TECO). To cope with the coordination requirement, an advanced planning and scheduling software system, the TECO System, has been designed to support the Alphasat operations and, in particular, to manage and coordinate the payload requests. The system was developed on top of the APSI planning framework, re-using some of its general modeling and solving functionality, and integrating ad-hoc evolutions to match the problem requirements. The TECO system was designed to be completely automated (i.e., it should run without any human intervention in the nominal case), considering the need to autonomously provide the end users (i.e., TDP Operation Centres) with the necessary information to understand the planning process, the analysis of the input requests, and the final operation plans. In this paper we present the planning and scheduling system and discuss how its functionality influenced the definition of the Alphasat TDP Operations concept. In addition, as the system is operational since October 2013, we also provide an initial assessment of operations so far.