Re: currencies

X-Sender: dmontana@po2.bbn.com
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Date: Wed, 02 Jun 1999 11:13:03 -0400
To: Andrew Shultz , bbn-ulps@po2.bbn.com
From: David Montana 
Subject: Re: currencies
Sender: owner-bbn-ulps@bbn.com

At 11:14 PM 05/25/1999 -0400, Andrew Shultz wrote:
>
>Second, we need a way to get the state of the currencies from outside - or
>else we can just start operations assuming everyone is presently current in
>everything.


AFORMS provides information about the current state of currencies, so
there is no need to assume anything at startup.  There are interesting
issues in terms of "reality" updates.  The automated scheduler will need
to make predictions about the currency items that a particular mission
satisfies.  Then, when the currency items get updated in AFORMS some
amount of time after the mission, the scheduler needs to check these
predictions against reality.  (Note that the 30 and 90 day flying hours
have this same issue with reality updates.)



>Third, we need missions to come in with information on which currencies
>they fulfill, and also how many crew members can use them to fill a given
>currency.  For instance, a mission with night landings fills someone's
>night landing currency.  Can it also fill someone else's takeoff currency?
>Can it fill two people's night landing currencies if there are two control
>sticks?  We need to get these when the mission comes in or have rules to
>generate them.


In the TPOC, we had rules to generate them.  I'm not sure if they are
as well separated from the code as some of the other business rules.
These rules were not generated from any AirForce manuals and are therefore
not necessarily correct.  In fact, in some cases, they were just pulled
out of our hat; in particular, I'm thinking about the rule for training
missions that said there could be four takeoff and landing events per
hour of a training mission.  Some of them were commonsense rules, such
as the one that said that the number of takeoff and landing events for
a mission were the same as the number of legs that had nonzero ground time
(i.e. were not air refueling).


>Third again, missions need to come in with information on what
>qualifications and currencies are required to fly them.


As far as currencies go, in the TPOC we assumed that all currencies
that were not up-to-date were grounding for all missions.  We did
this because this is what we were told to do, and we were told this
because it is true to first order.  The major currency items, such as
takeoffs and landings, are truly grounding for all missions.  You
should talk to our experts (John Irwin, Chuck Jolly) for the full story,
but I would guess that there is a very high correlation between what
currency items a mission satisfies and what currency items are required.

As far as qualifications go, the qualifications required for a particular
crew position for a particular mission is pretty much up to us to
deduce.  In the TPOC, we had crew complement business rules that
determined which positions were required, but I think that the
"business rules" that determined the qualifications for each position
were actually part of the code.


>Forth, what about ground training and currencies?  We need to be notified
>when pilots are going to go non-current on important ground things, so they
>won't be scheduled to fly missions that require those currencies.  And we
>need to be notified when they become current again.  Ideally this again
>gets rolled in with the first and second bits.


Ground training currencies also come from AFORMS.  We will indeed know
about these.  The question is how to keep from knowing more about these
than we need to know, especially since we will not be scheduling
ground training until release 1.2.


Dave