Chandra Automatic Processing Task Interface: An Adaptable System Architecture

The Chandra Automatic Processing Task Interface (CAPTAIN) is an operations interface to Chandra Automatic Processing (AP) that provides detail management and execution of the AP pipelines. In particular, this kind of management is used in Special Automatic Processing (SAP) where there is a need to select specific pipelines that require non-standard handling for reprocessing of a given data set. Standard AP currently contains approximately 200 pipelines with complex interactions between them. As AP has evolved over the life of the mission, so has the number and attributes of these pipelines. As a result, CAPTAIN provides a system architecture capable of managing and adapting to this evolving system. This adaptability has allowed CAPTAIN to also be used to initiate Chandra Source Catalog Automatic Processing (Level~3 AP) and positions it for use with future automatic processing systems. This paper describes the approach to the development of the CAPTAIN system architecture and the maintainable, extensible and reusable software architecture by which it is implemented.