Experiment scheduling for Spacelab missions

Abstract

The Experiment Scheduling Program (ESP) is the heart of a group of programs developed at NASA-Marshall to schedule the experiment activities of Spacelab and other Shuttle missions. Other programs in the group either prepare input data for ESP or produce derivative information based on the schedule produced by ESP. The task of experiment scheduling can be simply stated as positioning the experiment activities in a mission to that they collect their desired data without interfering with other activities. The program's capabilities as seen by the user are described along with mission constraints the program handles, and how the expert system in the program handles these constraints.