The Ground Resource Allocation and Planning Environment (GRAPE 1.0) is a Web-based, collaborative team environment based on the Microsoft SharePoint platform, which provides Deep Space Network (DSN) resource planners’ tools and services for sharing information and performing analysis. The foundation platform for GRAPE provides a number of communication and data-management mechanisms, which help planners communicate scheduling issues, including document management, security schemes, calendars, wikis, blogs, lists, issue tracking, discussion forums, work-flow management, alerts/notifications, and configuration management.

Additionally, a set of “web parts” has been developed for DSN resource-allocation-specific analysis, including tools for managing ground asset and mission information; finding configuration codes; displaying, querying, and comparing schedules; analyzing mission coverage; checking for schedule conflicts; creating and submitting schedule change requests; and viewing and validating mission view periods. The methodology of web parts allows individual users to compose their own Web pages by picking the web parts they want to use on a Web page, rather than developers designing Web pages for users. This allows developers to focus more on functionality and less on appearance and integration, while users are empowered to compose Web pages for their immediate analysis and collaboration needs rather than waiting for another long development cycle for some new capability. GRAPE web parts, which connect to existing DSN middle-tier Web services for many computation and data access activities, support Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and component-style development.

This work was done by Yeou-Fang Wang, Mitchell Schrock, John R. Baldwin, and Chester S. Borden of Caltech for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. For more information, download the Technical Support Package (free white paper) at www.techbriefs.com/tsp under the Software category.

This software is available for commercial licensing. Please contact Daniel Broderick of the California Institute of Technology at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Refer to NPO-45988.



This Brief includes a Technical Support Package (TSP).
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Team Collaboration Software

(reference NPO-45988) is currently available for download from the TSP library.

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