The objectives of the proposed development is to:

• provide facilities for crew procedure authoring as software as a service through common web technology

• substantially reduce installation and maintenance support required compared to today's distributed PC solution

• lower the life-time ownership cost for all ISS centres involved in crew procedure authoring and maintenance

• prepare the web authoring system for authoring procedures in other ESA domains, e.g. AIT/AIV, where processable XML procedure formats are beneficial.

 

 

For ISS, on board astronaut's procedures are following a standard to allow for efficient and flexible flight operations. The standard - ODF (onboard data file) Stds - prescribes semantic and format of any all on board crew procedures. The procedure documents are in XML format, with an ISS specific schema used.

Apart from the Standards document, a common procedure authoring tool is deployed (by NASA) for the multilateral ODF community. The tool in use currently is based on commercial PC software. On top of the PC software a special purpose ODF customization software has been developed, and maintained. Over the years several issues with this distributed authoring process have been encountered, e.g. cost effectiveness, and distributed sustaining engineering of the PC tool. In addition technical issues such as proper support for Logic Flow Procedure authoring and rendering, and previewing of a draft procedure in pdf format will be revisited with the technology shift from stand-alone to state-of-the-art Web implementation the tool.

 

In the frame of this activity the folllowing tasks shall be implemented:

• in a pragmatic way collect and analyze requirements on ODF procedure authoring from ISS ODF community members, e.g. with the support of a web based prototype. The requirements areas to be addressed are (at least) : engineering, usability, IT security, fitness of the tool in the overall ODF procedure management philosophy and libraries, and long term cost-effectiveness of the tool

• design and develop the system in accordance with the findings in the requirements engineering phase

• a usability test event with all stakeholders shall be held at around CDR

• demonstrate and deploy the completed system