ECSS Delivery Control (space-systems/ecss/q20-delivery)

Use when the task is the clause 5.7.5 delivery step of ECSS-Q-ST-20C: a prepared consignment is about to move, the transport is carried out against the transport standard of the Q-ST-20 series, and the certificate of conformity has to be issued — or withheld — on what the journey actually shows.

Domain quick reference

• The shipping document set is derived from the consignment, not chosen from a standing list. Crossing a border adds a customs declaration and an export authorisation; hazardous contents add a dangerous-goods declaration; a temperature or shock limit adds the monitoring record; an oversize lift adds the rigging plan.
• A declared environmental limit only means something if something recorded against it. An excursion is per parameter and per reading: three shocks over the bound are three excursions, and the worst one is what the receiving inspection has to be told about.
• A reading that lands exactly on a bound is inside it. The limit is the limit, and the few ULPs a sensor conversion carries are a representation question, not an engineering one.
• A monitor that stopped halfway leaves the rest of the journey unknown. An unmonitored stretch is not a compliant stretch, and the coverage fraction is reported so the gap can be sized rather than assumed away.
• The certificate of conformity identifies an item, not a shipment in general. Part number, serial and quantity have to be the same on the certificate as on the consignment, or the certificate covers something that was not sent.
• Authority to sign sits with the quality function. A delivery the review board held cannot acquire a certificate downstream, and a delivery carrying reservations needs them written on the certificate, not left in the minutes.

Workflow

1. Validate the consignment: part number, serial and a positive whole quantity, with each transport-relevant state stated rather than assumed.
2. Derive the mandatory shipping documents from those states and name each one the consignment is not carrying, matching names without regard to case or separator.
3. Validate the declared transport limits, allowing a one-sided bound, and refuse a reading for a parameter that has no declared limit instead of silently dropping it.
4. Count the excursions per parameter and keep the worst reading and the side it left the band on.
5. Compute the monitoring coverage over the transit duration and raise a shortfall as an unknown stretch, refusing a record that claims to cover more hours than the journey took.
6. Reconcile the certificate identification against the consignment.
7. Check the signing authority and the reservation listing against the delivery review outcome, then report every finding; the certificate is issuable only when none stands.

Pitfalls

• Shipping the same document pack every time. The pack that is right for a domestic benign move is short by two papers the moment the consignment crosses a border.
• Reporting one excursion because the recorder alarmed once. The count and the worst value are different facts, and receiving inspection needs both.
• Reading a flat trace from a stopped recorder as a quiet journey. A recorder that covered a third of the transit says nothing about the other two thirds, and that is a finding, not a pass.
• Issuing the certificate against the shipment rather than the item. A serial or a quantity that does not match means the certificate covers hardware that did not travel.
• Letting the shipping function sign the conformity. The signature is the quality function's, and a delivery the board held has no certificate to sign.
• Leaving reservations in the board minutes. What the customer receives is the certificate, so a delivery carried on a waiver has to say so on its face.

Behavior contract (gate 3)

The consignment validation, derived shipping document set, limit validation, per-parameter excursion counting, monitoring coverage, certificate identification reconciliation, signing authority and the combined issuance decision are exercised by the gate 3 contract test: scripts/test_q20_delivery.py against scripts/q20_delivery_logic.py (stdlib unittest, offline). Run: python3 scripts/test_q20_delivery.py

Compliance

• ECSS standards are freely downloadable (ESA); cite the source and paraphrase per standards-map.yaml.
• compliance: STANDARDS-REF, gated: false.