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 may implement this in whatever way they feel would be 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.