May 31^st, 2001 APT Visit Planner Meeting

Please send email to apt-vp@stsci.edu for any comments or corrections about these minutes.

Minutes (agenda)

Attendees

Can we meet on Thursday?

Actions from last meeting:
- Schedule Volt Demo
- Visit Planner in the Sea
- Analysis of HST's Constraints
Suggestions for Terminology

Suggestion for Top Level Requirements:
- The second bullet had bad grammer. How about:
- The third bullet was not clear about what tools would be responsible for implementing editors for modifying visits. Try rewording to make it clearer that the editors will not neccessarily be part of the visit planner. How does this sound:
- We would also like to have requirements for providing advice to the user for changing schedulability.
  - There are two levels for such advice. One would be pure documentation on techniques and strategies to use. A simple mechanism would be to provide a list of observation requirements that affect each observatory restriction.
  - The second level would be to provide analysis and suggestions about how to change the visits at hand to improve their schedulability. For example, the program could suggest alternate orients if there is a problem with solar panel angles.
  - Chris had a further idea about giving the user the ability to specify dates:
  - Most problems are straight forward with a direct relationship between an observation requirement and observatory restriction, such as, orient and solar panel angle.
    But, when links between visits are complicated, it can be extremely difficult to sort out how to make a visit schedulable.
    Guide stars are also complex and require deeper than typical user knowledge to solve. (The PC's have been struggling with this with NGSS/RPS2 and are currently putting together a detailed user's manual to help educate users with guide star problems.)
  - The biggest problems (in order of how much of a problem) for which advice to users would be most helpful are:
    1. Guide Stars
    2. Relative constraints between visits
    3. Target Visibility.
    Tricia was going to found out if we could get statistics on the biggest trouble makers. (Denise Taylor told me on Friday that these numbers are not yet available, but that Wayne Kinzel has project going on to pull out such numbers. If anyone wants more info, they should go talk to Wayne.)
  - Here are suggestions for two additional requirements for giving advice to the user:
    - be able to provide general advice on techniques to obtain desired schedulability.
    - be able to provide analysis of how particular visits might be modified to improve their schedulability or to obtain schedulability for particular dates.

Other Comments
- We hope to have a fully operational version out for cycle 12 (phase 1 or phase 2?).
- The GUI should have similar look-and-feel as the other APT tools. But, that doesn't mean the visit planner should be restricted to using the same kinds of editors or viewers to do its specific job. Just that it should do common things like other tools do.

Our next meeting will be Monday, June 4th at 3:00 in N310.

Information about the APT Visit Planner Project is available at

Agenda (minutes)

Welcome to Andy Gerb who will be our Spike expert.
Please subscribe to apt-vp:
- Send email to majordomo@stsci.edu with "subscribe apt-vp" in the body.
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Can we meet on Thursdays?
Actions from last meeting:
- Jesse scheduled Jeremy and company to come show us VOLT on June 11th.
- Rusty's look at SEA's Visit Planner
- Karla's list of HST constraints (see http://ra.stsci.edu/apst/apt/apt-visit-planner/requirements/karlas-constraint-list.txt )
Suggestions for Terminology:

Visit
Any grouping of observations which can be scheduled as a unit.

Observation Requirements
The requirements which observers place on observations to meet science goals.

Observatory Restrictions
The restrictions which an observatory places on observations as a matter of policy or physical limitations.
Suggestion for Top Level Requirements:
- be able to indicate when a visit can be scheduled,
- be able to indicate which observatory restrictions and observer requirements prevent a visit from scheduling at a particular time.
- provide the ability to modify visits and their relationships to change schedulability,
Start thinking about use cases and operations concepts.

Back to APT Visit Planner Page.

May 31st, 2001 APT Visit Planner Meeting

May 31^st, 2001 APT Visit Planner Meeting