Activity Planning Software Tool – Penn State

INSTITUTION

Penn State – Behrend (Erie)

CLASS

Nickel Class (2020 – 2021)

STUDENT TEAM

Cameron Watson, Software Engineering
Jonathan Williamson, Software Engineering
Keith Stanton, Software Engineering
Roger Branham, Software Engineering

ACADEMIC GUIDANCE

 

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 this in whatever way they felt best, 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. If done in a supportable and robust way with adequate documentation, the Psyche mission (and potentially other missions at JPL) will put this tool into use for operations.

PROJECT Summary Video

This work was created in partial fulfillment of Arizona State University Capstone Courses. The work is a result of the Psyche Student Collaborations component of NASA’s Psyche Mission (https://psyche.asu.edu). “Psyche: A Journey to a Metal World” [Contract number NNM16AA09C] is part of the NASA Discovery Program mission to solar system targets. Trade names and trademarks of ASU and NASA are used in this work for identification only. Their usage does not constitute an official endorsement, either expressed or implied, by Arizona State University or National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of ASU or NASA.