International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 28-31, 1996 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / A strategy for addressing the complexity of problem identification and notification by autonomous telemetry monitoring software is discussed. The Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (EUVE) satellite's science operations center (ESOC) is completing a transition to autonomous operations. Originally staffed by two people, twenty-four hours every day, the ESOC is nearing the end of a phased transition to unstaffed monitoring of the science payload health. To develop criteria for the implementation of autonomous operations we first identified and analyzed potential risk areas. These risk areas were then considered in light of a fully staffed operations model, and in several reduced staffing models. By understanding the accepted risk in the nominal, fully staffed model, we could define what criteria to use in comparing the effectiveness of reduced staff models. The state of the scientific instrument package for EUVE is evaluated by a rule-based telemetry processing software package. In the fully automated implementation, anomalous states are characterized in three tiers: critical to immediate instrument health and safety, non-critical to immediate instrument health and safety, and affecting science data only. Each state requires specific action on the part of the engineering staff, and the response time is determined by the tier. The strategy for implementing this prioritized, autonomous instrument monitoring and paging system is presented. We have experienced a variety of problems in our implementation of this strategy, many of which we have overcome. Problems addressed include: dealing with data dropouts, determining if instrument knowledge is current, reducing the number of times personnel are paged for a single problem, prohibiting redundant notification of known problems, delaying notification of problems for instrument states that do not jeopardize the immediate health of the instrument, assuring a response to problems in a timely manner by engineering staff, and communicating problems and response status among responsible personnel.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 30-November 02, 1995 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / The UC Berkeley Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (EUVE) Science Operations Center (ESOC) is developing and implementing knowledge-based software to automate the monitoring of satellite payload telemetry. Formerly, EUVE science payload data were received, archived, interpreted, and responded to during round-the-clock monitoring by human operators. Now, knowledge-based software will support, augment, and supplement human intervention. In response to and as a result of this re-engineering project, the creation, storage, revision, and communication of information (the information flow process) within the ESOC has been redesigned. We review the information flow process within the ESOC before, during, and after the re-engineering of telemetry monitoring. We identify six fundamental challenges we face in modifying the information flow process. (These modifications are necessary because of the shift from continuous human monitoring to a knowledge-based autonomous monitoring system with intermittent human response.) We describe the innovations we have implemented in the ESOC information systems, including innovations in each part of the information flow process for short-term or dynamic information (which changes or updates within a week) as well as for long-term or static information (which is valid for more than a week). We discuss our phased approach to these innovations, in which modifications were made in small increments and the lessons learned at each step were incorporated into subsequent modifications. We analyze some mistakes and present lessons learned from our experience.