Failure Manager
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| Started in | 02/2014 |
|---|---|
| Description | Failure Management Framework |
| Maintainer(s) | galvedro, Necolatis, Hooray |
| Contributor(s) | User:galvvedro (since 01/2014), |
| Status | Under active development as of 02/2014 |
| Topic branches: | |
| fgdata | soon |
Targeted FlightGear versions: 3.10+
Current Situation
Hardcoded instruments generally use the "serviceable" property to enable/disable the update() method (function) - sometimes, there's additional support for certain types of failures.
Limitations
- The problem is that the dialog is hard-coded, so it wouldn't be reflected there. It would be nice to generate the dialog procedurally instead...
- The GUI dialog is currently static, i.e. it not possible to add failures dynamically - or aircraft-specific failures.
I think you could add a section detailing ideas for future improvements, such as creating the dialog procedurally - galvedro will probably also have a few ideas related to this. If the two of you should get stuck somewhere related to Nasal/Canvas etc, get in touch with me so that I can provide some help. Like Philosopher said previously, we will want to create the dialog dynamically and introduce support for galvedro's framework. For testing purposes, I would prototype things using the c172p or some other well-developed aircraft that has different instruments and systems (electrical, pneumatics, hydraulics). We had quite a few folks here interested in systems modeling, so having a tutorial on how to use galvedro's system would probably help them use it for these purposes.
Personally, I do like the MTBF-based system, but I would like to see this separated, so that the same failure code could also be used by people to explicitly fail something, i.e. via an instructor console/station - or even just remotely via telnet/httpd.
Status
galvedro was interested in working out some scripting-space failure system - you may want to get in touch with him. That said, I do agree with Philosopher that the dialog should be turned into a Nasal submodule so that it can be created procedurally.
It definitely is overlapping with galvedro's plans on coming up with a scripting space framework for instrument modeling, and his contributions are remarkably clean and extensible already. I think the only thing missing here are a handful of hooks and of course some automated/procedural dialog generator. I would prefer the latter to be based on abstract classes, so that future updates (once we start ripping out PUI and only use Canvas dialogs) are straightforward. And I can help with the details here, because we started doing the same thing for the wizard framework.
galvedro actually looked at the failure.nas script a couple of months ago while researching existing functionality for systems modeling. I definitively need to allocate a slot for writing wiki page about the framework I am working on
Basically, I think the failure functionality should be a central facility provided by the sim. It should definitively _not_ implement any particular system failure by default, but provide the logic for managing MTBF events or on demand failure mode activation. It should also provide a subscription interface so aircraft systems can register their own failure modes. After all, only the aircraft "object" is really aware of what systems are being modeled.
I have not touched this code yet, but the way I see this working with the general systems modeling framework is something like this:
1. A system that implements failure modes provides InputPorts for triggering them. On aircraft loading, those ports subscribed to a "Failure Manager" provided by the sim.
- http://forum.flightgear.org/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=21855&hilit=failures&start=15#p198524
- http://forum.flightgear.org/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=21855&hilit=failures&start=15#p198529
Related
- [Aircraft Failure System]
- How does serviceable and failures work?