Nexus: Planning Tomorrow, Today

Abstract

To prepare for future human space flight programs, the Mission Operations Laboratory (MOL) at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) has been investigating new planning and scheduling paradigms. To support and prove this investigation, MOL technologists have developed a working prototype of a scheduling system to support the new paradigms. The new planning and scheduling system is called Nexus and has a web site at http://nexus.nasa.gov/. Nexus is based on a comprehensive modeling schema to capture all scheduling requirements typical to human space missions, an incremental scheduling engine tailored to the modeling schema, and remote access (including Personal Data Assistant (PDA) access) to the scheduling system. This paper describes the proposed paradigm shift and the enabling software. It also describes a typical Nexus demonstration which emphasizes how it works, how it enables the paradigm shift, and possible applications. Demonstrations include access to the full functionally of Nexus from a personal computer and access to limited functionally via a PDA. An appendix includes a description and screen shots of the demonstrations.