EPS (Experiment Planning System)

EPS Overview

From [EPSD], The Experiment Planning System (EPS) is a software tool developed for the creation of th experiment operations for a specific time period (mission scenario). An operation timeline (ITL) is first entered, which comprises a list of experiment operations and a specific time for when each operation has to be executed. The EPS then checks for constraint violations one ach of the experiments and their operations.In order to use the EPS, the experiment operational procedures/requirements, and the experiment environment must first be modelled and implemented. This is done using an Experiment Description File (EDF) for the experiment model, and an Event File (EVF) for the environment model. The EDF provides a generic way to model experiment operations.

The environment model in turn generates operational boundaries,which can either affect the experiment as a whole or can be restricted to a specific experiment operation. After describing the experiments, operations can be requested through an operations timeline, known as an Input Timeline (ITL). The EPS will run the timeline checking for conflicts.

The EPS uses a modular approach for defining an experiment, and can therefore still be used even if only limited information about an experiment is provided.In order to perform conflict resolving at different levels and using

EPS Inputs

Observation Definition Files (ODF)

Tha maximum lenght of the observation label is set to 100 characters.

Instrument Timeline Files (ITL/OTL)

The same way, the ITL files need to start with ITL_ or OTL_.

Payload Operations Requests (POR/PDOR)

The way EPS identifies POR XML files is by its prefix (it checks that the POR filename starts with the first 4 letters set to POR_). The validity range is not needed when using a top-level ITL that provides start and end times. The validity range of the event timeline should always be greater or equal to the validity range of the action timeline

EPS Simulation

The EPS simulation starts after (1 second) the simulation start time, any action or observation that is scheduled at the simulation start time will not be taken into account in the simulation.

Derived Events

The EPS Derived Events allow the user to define events derived from already existing events by applying a number of operations.

In order to include them a new file called derived_events.def must be present in the same directory where the file events definition file is.

For example, we can defined an event derived from an Europa flyby with a given time shift:

CA_EUROPA_DER = (CA_EUROPA+00:15:00)

Then we would need to add the following line in the event definition file:

5282  CA_EUROPA_DER            CA_EUROPA_DER                 -                         -     -     FALSE  -    0  GLOBAL     MOMENTARY   INACTIVE

In this case, it will generate the same events as CA_EUROPA_DER but starting 15 minutes later.

For complete documentation (restricted access): [Derived Events Query Language](https://s2e2.cosmos.esa.int/confluence/display/PSS/On+Events+Query+Language)