Activity Planning Software Tool – Penn State Behrend
INSTITUTION
Penn State Behrend
CLASS
Nickel Class (2020 – 2021)
STUDENT TEAM
Cameron Watson, Software Engineering
Jonathan Williamson, Software Engineering
Keith Stanton, Software Engineering
Roger Branham, Software Engineering
TECHNICAL GUIDANCE
Shaheer Khan, Mission Planning and Sequencing Team Lead, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Chris Lawler, Planning & Execution Systems Engineer, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
ACADEMIC GUIDANCE
Dr. Naseem Ibrahim, Associate Professor, Computer Science and Software Engineering, Penn State Behrend
Dr. Meng Su, Associate Professor, Computer Science and Software Engineering, Penn State Behrend
Dr. Wen-Li Wang, Associate Professor, Computer Science and Software Engineering, Penn State Behrend
PROJECT DESCRIPTION
Science Planning team members from the Psyche mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) requested the capstone team to design and build a software tool to help science planners visually ‘diff’ two plans. In other words, given two plans (time-lists of activity instances), the tool would show science planners, in some way, a timeline with visual indicators of how activities moved (or were added/removed) between one version of the plan and another. The student team implemented a solution, guided by direct feedback from JPL science planners. The Psyche science planners provided sample input files as well as sketches of what would be useful for the final diffs to look like.