Developing an End-to-End Planning Application from a Timeline Representation Framework

Abstract

This paper describes aspects of a project aiming at creating a general, flexible and reusable software architecture to address planning problems in space missions. It introduces recent work to realize an open software framework for supporting development of planning and scheduling space applications. The framework, which is named TRF (Timeline-based Representation Framework), aims at supporting application development within different space missions for the European Space Agency (ESA). It is currently being tested on three problem examples, all solved on top of the TRF functionalities. This paper describes the TRF three-layered software architecture and shows how it has been used to deploy a complete application, named MrSPOCK, an interactive system for Long Term Planning in the MARS EXPRESS operational mission.