The role of computational steering in space engineering activities assisted by modelling and simulation

• Ano de defesa: 2014
• Autor(a) principal: Leandro Toss Hoffmann
• Orientador(a): Leonel Fernando Perondi
• Banca de defesa: Fabiano Luis de Sousa, Valdemir Carrara, Fausto de Oliveira Ramos, Emilia Villani
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE)
• Programa de Pós-Graduação: Programa de Pós-Graduação do INPE em Engenharia e Gerenciamento de Sistemas Espaciais
• País: BR
• Link de acesso: http://urlib.net/sid.inpe.br/mtc-m21b/2014/09.24.16.28

Nowadays, computational simulation has a fundamental role on supporting engineering activities across the life cycle of a space mission. As a consequence, the pursuit for leaner processes and flexible tools has been the focus of numerous investigations in the system engineering and simulation fields. In this direction, the current work presents a novel approach for designing and conducting scenario of spacecraft simulation, envisaging the improvement of space engineering practices by employing computational steering methods. In the context of a scientific application, steering is a technique to enhance the level of user interaction in a computational system in order to allow a specialist to actively guide the course a simulation, by on-line changing model parameters and visually monitoring the effects on the scenario. In order to achieve such level of interactivity, in this work, an advanced simulation facility is proposed to combine state of art concepts on satellite simulation and the most relevant features of computational steering. The benefits of applying these concepts in the development of space systems are demonstrated in case studies inspired in real life problems, such as the verification and validation of a piece of flight software, commonly adopted to determine the direction of Sun on-board the spacecraft. The results have shown that the improvement of user interactivity in the spacecraft simulation is a promising approach to deal with geometrically complex scenarios and problems with high number of parameters, thereby contributing to streamline manifold space engineering processes.