Model-driven Approach to Spacecraft Operations Development
Spacecraft Operations Language Metamodel™ (SOLM™)defines a metamodel to represent spacecraft operations procedures. These procedures contain sequences of instructions to conduct spacecraft operations, typically consisting of spacecraft commands and spacecraft telemetry comparisons. Historically, these procedures have been captured in flowcharts, text manuals, and a number of different scripting languages used for ground station automation. SOLM instead provides a unified way to represent procedures for spacecraft operations, based on a standardized metamodel. This facilitates the transfer of these procedures between the spacecraft integrator and the spacecraft operator.
SOLM provides for interchange of spacecraft operations procedures between organizations and ground systems. Using a model-driven approach, a platform independent model (PIM) for a procedure can be created in a SOLM-compatible modeling tool or from an existing operations script. The PIM can then be used to generate a platform-specific script for use in a specific ground system.
The specification also defines a SpacePython target language that supports all of the SOLM features. Adopting SpacePython as the script format provides feature-for-feature mapping to the SOLM, and allows use of open source and commercially available Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for procedure development and debugging.