Mission Automation Infrastructure Tools at ESOC

In order to reduce operation costs the European Space Operations Centre has implemented generic tools that will enable the automation of the mission operations. They will be first used by the Earth Explorer AEOLUS mission. The approach taken by the Agency is to deploy the automation tools with low risk, keeping the existing operation concept but replacing step by step the manual operations with automatic operations executed via the Mission Automation System (MATIS). The paper will report about the lessons learned in the design and development of these automation tools as well as the actual experience of the AEOLUS mission team with their use.