Currently within CDF studies, the majority of considerations and design aspects of the ground segment and mission operations are captured manually within an integrated team and iterated upon during the CDF sessions via presentations and verbal exchange. There is a limited capture of the ground segment design and associated parameters values within OCDT and a limited digital integration of operational concerns (e.g. linking OCDT ActualFiniteStates and associated ParameterValueSets to mission phases and subsequent operational constraints). Whilst the ground segment is treated at mainly a high conceptual level in the early design phases, there are areas where a formal capture within a system model could improve the efficiency and rigour of trade off considerations and potentially better assess feasibility of innovative concepts, including trade-offs of functional allocation across ground and space segments. It could be investigated how novel concepts, currently introduced manually (e.g. multi-centre or distributed operations services, multi-asset operations, delay-tolerant networking, multi-mission ground system architectures) can be modelled and integrated with the OCDT model. Other areas of interest might be digital capture of full ground station characteristics, enabling model-based trade off capabilities for a ground-space link budget, the creation of reference libraries for ground segment system models for re-use across studies, or generation of sections of the final report from a model. This idea is to perform an analysis of where added value through additional digital capture and model-based representation of ground segment and operations within CDF studies could be achieved. Following this analysis, if a need is identified, a next task would be to identify a suitably flexible/sustainable method and tooling to achieve this, e.g. existing ECSS-TM-25/OCDT modelling capability or other tools for which an adapter shall be developed and integrated (PLGSE/ADGE-OCDT).
