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Objectives
Since the end of the operational life of Olympus, ESA has procured satellite capacity on Eutelsat satellites to support development projects and pre-operational service demonstrations. So far the coordination for the access to the satellite capacity has been carried out by a human operator through a manual process, consisting of gathering the requests from the users, identifying the operational modes compatible with the set of requests received for the same time slot, and notifying the new access schedule to the user community.
All this has been proved to be a cumbersome, resource intensive exercise, which could be in reality effectively replaced by a distributed booking system. The benefit originated by the adoption of such booking system would be to drastically reduce the involvement of human intervention for coordinating the access to the ESA capacity, allowing a much faster, and more organised way to respond to the different requests coming from the user community.
The primary objective of the project has been to develop and implement a system (Hardware and Software) able to provide a complete and flexible solution for managing the ESA capacity resource via a web-based interface.
Challenges
The SAGAN platform has made extensive use of Internet COTS software. Extensive experience in choosing, deploying and supporting these products together with a deep understanding of standard internet technology has been essential to the success of the project. Extensive trade-off analyses have been performed. The selected products are Open Source because they have been found to provide the best choice encompassing minimum risk with maximum performance.
In the SAGAN platform, security considerations have been taken into account from the beginning. Security has been integrated in the SAGAN development and validation process from start to finish. This is definitely a complex task that is essential for any internet technologies based platform.
Plan
Phase 1: January 2nd 2003 – March 6th 2003
- Analyse operational requirements.
- Prepare a Functional and Performance Requirements Baseline.
- Elaborate the Technical Specifications, the ICD and the DJF.
- Propose and review the User Interface.
Phase 2: March 6th 2003 – January 15th 2004
- Procure the Hardware Items.
- Develop the Design Definition File and update the DJF.
- Integrate the SAGAN system and perform Validation Testing.
- Produce the IOM and the User Guide.
- Deliver and Integrate the SAGAN system.
- Perform an Acceptance Review.
Operation and Maintenance: January 15th 2004 – July 15th 2005
Current Status
The SAGAN system is installed at ESA-ESRIN.
A SAGAN user/password is required to access the tool. From 1st March 2004 SAGAN is the tool to book ESA satellite capacity on SESAT, HELLASAT for the authorised ARTES users.
