Interaction with other Actors

The pipeline interacts with a number of actors in the system. It also plays an important role in the sequence diagram for the array activity. The following actors interact with the data pipeline:

The user(s), such as the PI/CoIs who will most frequently be in their home institute. If they want to go beyond the informations automatically provided by the scheduler, they may inspect the output of the pipeline. Their control on pipeline input parameters may be specified at the proposal stage. Fully interactive observations should indeed be well justified because they have a strong impact on the dynamic scheduling, with a risk of lower overall efficiency.

The operators, the astronomers on duty and engineers close to the array will use the pipeline as one of the tools to control the behavior of the system in general and to check that the automated procedures lead to rational sequential events. Because of their expertise they should have the privilege to modify some of pipelines parameter specifications initially provided by the user.

databases: the array will feed automatically the raw data into a low level database. At the same time it will feed the pipeline with these raw data. The pipeline will output its results into one or two databases of much lower volume, the first one with results obtained systematically by fully automated pipeline procedures, and a second one used when manual interaction has been necessary. Manual interaction should proceed on a parallel system to avoid breaking the fully automated procedure, in order to guarantee the homogeneity of the database obtained with fully automated processing.

Other Software Functions: The pipeline will interact with a number of other software functions, such as:

• Basic analysis tools: visualization, measurement tools, diagnostic tools...

• system analysis: telescope efficiency optimization etc.

• interactive tools used by the operators, engineers and astronomers

• the actual observing program,

• the dynamic scheduler.