[Sois-tcoa] Plug and play

[Scott Burleigh]

Chris Plummer wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> Please find attached a first draft of a short discussion about 
> plug-and-play and what it means, in my view, to SOIS. My aim here is to 
> narrow down the focus and to clarify what we, SOIS, need to be looking 
> at in the near future in order to support the development of 
> plug-and-play techniques onboard spacecraft. Plug-and-play can mean many 
> things to many people, but I have tried to be pragmatic and to look at 
> only the basic capabilities that are needed in order for other, more 
> imaginative people to build their empires around it. I apologise that 
> this has been prepared in a hurry, and is probably full of mistakes.

Chris, I think this paper is really good: I started out with essentially no knowledge of this technology whatsoever, and at the end of six pages I feel there is some hope that I could understand some of it if I applied myself.

One possible addition: it seems to me that the publish-subscribe communication model offers a sort of software analog to hardware plug-and-play.  That is, properly implemented, I think it has to accomplish the same basic functions of configuration change detection (addition or removal of nodes), device identification (node registration), and device enumeration (again node registration, but also this is sort of what topic subscription accomplishes).  It may or may not be useful to extend the plug-and-play notion to encompass this software auto-configuration as well, but if it were then I would be glad to try to contribute some text.

Scott