Preparing a Ground System for Plug and Play Exchange of Hardware

One of the keys to improve operation of a ground segment is to become more efficient in the use of the given assets. For ground station hardware, this may mean to establish pool concepts and reuse the existing hardware whenever possible for several missions. In addition, one can reduce the need of having spare parts at hand if one is able to use one given part as spare for any system, wherever it is needed. The former requires to be prepared to support any mission on any available hardware, usually named “multi-mission concept.” The latter can be achieved in two ways: Either one uses equal types of equipment for all systems—which is hard to maintain for a variety of systems over a long time span—or one is prepared to dynamically change parts of the system, without changing the performance of the system. We shall call this feature, the ability to replace some hardware by different equipment, without changing the way the system as a whole is operated, a “plug and play solution.”