Simple Schedule Book Status
What happened? Why the 2nd Agency Review?
E. Barkley
NASA/JPL
01 May 2017
A Cautionary Tale of Why Even Simple Things
are Not Necessarily So
• Simple Schedule Book was (and still is) relative simple expression of Agency
TT+C Network Schedule
• Had its 1st Agency Review in late 2014
• All RIDS processed, next version produced…
• *BUT* by Spring 2015, CESG was stewing and getting consternated by “out
of control” registries
• A “crash course” of registry engineering ensued culminating in revised SANA
procedure and brand new spiffy RMP (Registry Management Policy) that was
published in June 2016
• There was argument against holding in-progress recommendations “hostage” to
RMP development (just keep track of them) vs “if we don’t get this in place now it
will only get worse”; the later was the opinion that held and so SoS was put on
hold/delayed…by a good 18 months!
While “on hold”….
• ESA and DSN NASA/JPL already had a real need for exchanges of
schedules…
• So they started working with the format in ways very close to their
operations…
• This lead to three improvements on the recommendations…that were all
optional, but presented and checked with the WG…
• One more (optional) inclusion semantic (which indicates the boundaries for which
items show up for given publication interval), which in turn lead to a better
statement of inclusion semantics in general (the original inclusion semantic is in still
the document too)
• (Optional) association kinds so that a schedule publisher can provide linkage
information for DDOR or MSPA type activities
• (Optional) agency defined complex parameter types via agency specific XML schema
to provide a more robust (and validate-able at the level of XML parsers) extension
capability (“pure” R1 stuffs this all into a generic string)
And, oh, by the way….
• The WG continued to march forward with things like improved
overview diagrams…and here is better way to do XML Schema in
general (more attributes, lesser elements)…and here is a more correct
UML diagram….
• So….in conjunction with on going exchanges between ESA/ESTRACK
and NASA/JPL/DSN…the book got modified here and there…and there
and here…and then a bit more….and…
The secretariat took a look…
• @#$%!!! – this has “massive” changes from the Red-1 book!! Here is the
differences file %@#*! YOU NEED A 2ND AGENCY REVIEW!
• Well, okay…the differences files comes to 67 pages of changes…for an 89
page document….its not easy to argue against this but, if you go through
the change pages, the changes can be classified as…
•
•
•
•
•
•
Overview diagram
Inclusion semantics
Optional association types
Conformance with RMP (please note the irony)
Extension point improvement – especially re use of agency specific schemas
Improved schema construction technique (more substantial use of attributes, etc)
Well…okay…
• From my perspective the changes are not so massive, but its hard to
argue against the appearances…a rather exhaustive and convincing
presentation of the “knock-on” effects would likely have to be
developed
• E.g, these schema changes on pages x through y are because of addition of
optional inclusion semantics on page a and b (which by the way is in reponse
to R1 RID n), and so these change pages, although changes from literal point
of view, can logically be considered as only one change.
• Yeah, right.
• Longer term, I think it is more expeditious to go with the 2nd agency
review
What will need to do…
• Support the 2nd agency review
• Help people understand what has truly changed
vs what is “noise” level change
• Augment the prototype test report to capture
the ESTRACK/DSN interactions (we have to do
this in any case)
• Hopefully you are more enlightened…we still
have a recommendation that should be
published this year and ESTRACK/DSN are
already implementing and there is substantial
interest from OMG as the recommendation
looks good to them (and, it is very very good!)