OCAI: The Operations Companion to support decision making of flight control teams

As everywhere in our daily life, more and more virtual assistants are very helpful in particular due to the ever-increasing evolution of the complexity of systems and the fragmentation of the data produced. This is obviously the case in our operational control centers and yet few software applications in the domain are currently available and this therefore remains a major and priority innovation to be made in the near future.

ESOC, ESA's operations center in Darmstadt, took the lead and developed a first application, OCAI, the Operations CompAnIon, to address the operators’ pain point of having to operate multiple systems to retrieve, combine and analyse data in their daily decision-making processes; the tool was developed from scratch and in just a few months became operational for several missions and is now being by the missions’ flight control teams..

This was briefly presented during the last SpaceOps 2023 and also during the animation of the COMET OPS at the end of March dedicated to innovation in operations. This aroused the interest of many people who asked to know more and in particular to have the opinion of users.

It is precisely the purpose of this presentation, kindly accepted by ESOC, to tell us much more about OCAI, both in terms of principles, architecture and IT integration as well as on aspects of operational use, ergonomics, adoption by operators, as well as the planned next steps. We will also try to leave enough time for exchanges with the participants without forgetting the perspectives and possible collaborations with ESOC on OCAI.

This presentation was held in 100% virtual mode, open to all and free.

Please note that the event has been recorded. You can send us an email (comet-ops@cnes.fr) and we will send you the recording.

You can also download the presentation slides attached to this page.