[Moims-mp] Regarding some ideas for simplification of the MPS Blue Book

[Barrett, Anthony C (US 393K)]

Hi All,

I was tantalized by the simplification discussion, and hope that Peter's book splitting ideas can become feasible.  I mentioned them to my NASA colleagues and *finally* got some interest on their part.  I also suspect that the blue book is trying to do too much.  Here are my thoughts on this.

1) I really like Peter's suggestion to break things up into 3 books, but I would suggest a 4th book too. 

(a) an information model book, 
(b) a core mission planning & scheduling services book, 
(c) an MPS constraint model blue book, 
(d) an XML specification for MPS messages.  

Please understand that NASA is much more interested it (a) and (d) than in the services, especially if (a) and (d) can be made MAL and COM agnostic.  This is the primary motivation for a desire for a file interface.

2) While I have only been getting second-hand summaries of the MO Framework discussions, they have made me aware of some of my assumptions.  First, I am not fully certain of the COM need.  Is the focus on COM due to a desire to archive?  If so, I have to wonder if COM is even needed here.  Similarly, many plans have pointers to plans that they were derived from.  This seems to be a form of version control.  While important, is both version control and archiving actually required in a standard?  Most legacy planning systems that I know of do not support those 2 features directly.  Instead they save the current plan & planning domain into a file and apply archiving and version control at the file level using established tools.  This is another motivation for the desire for a file interface.

See you tomorrow!  (from my California perspective)

-Tony