Scheduling as an interoperability service and its security aspects

Abstract

More and more complex space missions require increasing number of components, which need to be configured, monitored and controlled. At the same time, due to financial, technical, geographical, political or operational reasons, many of such components need to be interoperable. Different sites and agencies want to exchange operational and technical information in an instantaneous and standardized manner. And this tendency will surely increase in the future. Driven by such missions, many different solutions out of information technology world start to be used in inter-agency communication. Also the efforts performed by the CCSDS support that -just to mention the well-established Space Link Extension (SLE) or upcoming Service Management. All this aims at the Holy Grail of space missions: fully automated, cost effective and yet safe and sophisticated spacecraft operations. As we are not going to answer the question how far it is possible to reach that target, we surely discuss how much single solutions influence and enhance the daily operations. In our paper we put a special focus on more challenges for station planning and scheduling systems. Also the CCSDS Service Management works on standardization of management information exchange using new technologies. The German Space Operations Centre (GSOC) performs currently analysis and prototyping for new station scheduling concept, which shall support standardization efforts as well as being prepared for future mission challenges and complex, dynamic scheduling tasks. The analysis showed that despite choices in technical implementations and complex interfaces, the security aspects of the operational environment become visible. Operational management systems, where scheduling is an example of, have partially contradictory requirements. On one hand they need to receive and provide sometimes very detailed and possibly confidential information (most prominent reason for that would be automation of operations), on the other hand, there is a need to communicate this information with external partners over the secure borders. We've found out that this is not only the problem of an encryption or authentication, but also imposes direct changes in technical service implementation and interfaces. In some cases, such technical solutions also impose actual change in the way the operations are performed. Results of this work are presented, and possible issues and solutions are shown.