PINTA and TimOnWeb – (more than) generic user interfaces for various planning problems

In the recent years, the “Program for INteractive Timeline Analysis” PINTA and the timeline visualization web-client “TimOnWeb”, formerly also known as “Timeline Offline Navigator”, developed at the German Space Operation Center (GSOC), were continuously improved and experienced several evolution steps. PINTA is a GUI application running on Windows-based computer systems. Its main purpose is to serve as the anchor tool for a mission planning operations engineer when generating or analyzing a mission timeline, including the possibility to call automatic planning and scheduling algorithms of the embedded generic planning library PLATO. TimOnWeb is a web application running on all common web browsers, allowing a remote user or even a remotely connected mission planning engineer to have insight into the current operational timeline as for example generated by PINTA and PLATO, relying on the same data representation. PINTA and TimOnWeb are the generic basis of many semi-automated mission planning systems for past, current and future spacecraft projects operated at GSOC, for example for the missions Grace, TET-OOV, FireBird, Grace-FollowOn and Eu:CROPIS. Furthermore, PINTA serves as the timeline analysis tool for validating the TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X mission planning system. The variety of use cases was further extended to support the planning of the on-call shifts at GSOC, and to support Launch and Early Orbit Phases (LEOPs) in its special configuration as the new generic editing tool for the so-called “Sequence of Events”. The paper at hand will explain these use cases and the responsibilities of the tools, while giving an overview of PINTA, its components and their set-up, with laying an emphasis on the latest development achievements.