Overview

An Intelligent Assistant commonly excels in employing AI methods to support advanced search, question-answering, content generation, task automation, and personalization.

These capabilities are of great importance in a space mission operations centre, where information critical for the successful completion of operational tasks is scattered across numerous diverse data sources, often resulting in multiple iterations of the user among different systems to locate, retrieve, correlate and analyse the needed data.

The European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), has developed the Operations CompAnIon (OCAI), an AI tool that supports flight control teams' decision-making processes by addressing the complexity and fragmentation of data systems in operational control centres.

Developed to alleviate the challenges of managing multiple heterogeneous systems, OCAI utilizes Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering approaches to offer a ‘one-stop-shop solution’ to operators and engineers, essentially streamlining access to Mission Operations information relevant for operational and training activities and offering all the insights in a single application via an intuitive User Interface.

The tool is able to link information and offer advanced correlation and search capabilities, automatic metadata extraction, including implied and related terms, across data sources of heterogeneous data types, from TM/TC archives, procedures and anomaly reports, to mission manuals and system and human logs.

OCAI, already embraced by 10 ESOC missions to support quick search, information retrieval and new Flight Control Teams training, is currently being equipped with additional AI capabilities, such as the use of Large Language Models for the provision of accurate answers and references across the full knowledge base, the generation of reports and the automation of specific tasks, in close coordination with the end-users.

Exploiting its modular architecture, OCAI is also being tested on diverse domains, namely Earth Observation, Science, and Human Robotic Exploration use cases.

The system is deployed operationally and supports expanded platform functionalities which enhance its level of reliability like monitoring dashboards, data segregation and authorization systems.