SatConPlan: A Satellite Pre-Pass Contact Planning Aid for Operations Support and Training

SHAI, in cooperation with our subcontractor, 21st Century Systems, Inc. (21CSI), will develop SatConPlan, a pre-pass planning aid that will improve the efficacy and accuracy of preparations for satellite contacts, and that will enable improved offlinesimulation-based training for satellite and ground station operators. This system will help to ensure that ground station hardware and personnel are fully prepared to exploit every contact opportunity. The system will exploit the Flowchart Task Tutoringand Tracing Toolkit (FT4)technology that we developed during Phase I to represent the procedures that the operators are expected to learn and follow. This representation allows for conditional branching, unordered (parallel) steps, alternate and optionalsteps, hierarchical and recursive nesting of parameterized sub-procedures, and exception handling. The SatConPlan system exploit an agent-based architecture and uniform interface protocols to achieve flexible modularity.21CSI will assist SHAI to obtain access to and to codify the procedures to be used by the Air Force SBIRS Low program, assist in the development of a robust agent system, and facilitate integration of SatConPlan with the satellite command generation aid.