Intelligent Orchestration for Hosted Payload Architectures in Satellite-as-a-Service Missions

The rapid growth of the “Satellite-as-a-Service” market and the rise of In-Orbit Demonstration/Validation (IOD/IOV) missions have accelerated the demand for flexible hosted-payload architectures. Integration of third‑party payloads onto a host bus introduces complex challenges in resource contention, interface standardization, and operational risk management. Traditional integration of third‑party payloads onto a host bus suffers from resource contention, interface incompatibilities, and heightened operational risk. This paper presents the application of orbital_OLIVER as an intelligent orchestration layer that decouples host‑platform constraints from guest‑payload objectives, enabling seamless, on‑board mission adaptation.

orbital_OLIVER contribution is twofold. First, it provides a flexible planning engine that dynamically generates payload‑operation schedules by jointly accounting for resource availability, mission constraints, and request priority. Second, it embeds a conditional‑execution framework that fuses payload and data‑processing tasks into event‑driven, real‑time procedures, supporting complex concepts such as tip‑and‑cue and adaptive command sequences.

The architecture is designed for user‑centric configurability: users can easily configure experiments by defining payload and data processing tasks and combining them into multi-stage conditional procedures. The system automatically assembles them into a unified orbital_OLIVER configuration, which incorporates static information about the mission and the satellite platform and can be updated in‑flight to reflect evolving user requirements. Execution requests can be submitted at any time; the onboard autonomy module plans and schedules them, ensuring continuous alignment with mission goals.

By shifting the burden of ConOps adaptation from operators to the autonomous orchestration layer, orbital_OLIVER reduces workload, improves scalability, and enables sophisticated, real‑time mission responses while preserving platform stability.