How does AXIOM™ make it all work?

MOLTEK left behind sole reliance upon the traditional engineering software languages like Java, Visual Basic or Fortran, and developed the AXIOM™ system to use the power of the increasingly popular and rapidly evolving eXtensible Markup Language (XML).  

Due to the generic nature of satellite operations, all operations tasks and information can be stored in an XML document, and different sets of stylesheets can be created to provide any desired type of output.

Our engineers exploited the generic nature of satellite operations and recognized that the vast majority of the changes required to satellite operations data/documents are a consequence of the need to represent the data in a different way. Consequently, all operations tasks and information can be stored in an XML document, and different sets of stylesheets can be created to provide any desired type of output. Different levels of detail or different types of technical content can be supported for paper document output simply by using a different stylesheet set, without ever changing the XML source document containing the operations steps. When it is necessary to modify the actual methodology used to perform operations due to changes in spacecraft operations design, discovery of signatures, failures, or whatever other reason, use of AXIOM™ allows those changes to be made in a single place, and they automatically "cascade" to each of the different output documents when publishing is performed.

This concept of each different output document having the same single XML source of information is illustrated below with some basic examples.

Conversion of Existing Products to AXIOM XML

When there is a need to perform extensive modifications to existing operational procedures or real-time-specific software procedures (e.g. to adapt to a new real-time system), the cost of manually modifying the existing procedures or creating new procedures can be extremely high. This cost can be dramatically reduced through the use of a customized AXIOM™ Converter that translates existing documents into the AXIOM™ XML structure. These converted files can then be published with the AXIOM™ system to produce the desired type/syntax output files. The effectiveness of this conversion process has been proven successful for the conversion of full sets of procedures and software procedures for Boeing Satellite Systems' 702 satellite product line as well PanAmSat's existing 702 satellites.

For more information, or to receive a free whitepaper entitled "Improving Spacecraft Operations via XML Technologies", email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..