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rsmp-nordic / rsmp_sxl_traffic_lights

RSMP Signal Exchange List (SXL) for Traffic Controllers
MIT License
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S0001...4 - Add name information #192

Open mr-entropia opened 4 months ago

mr-entropia commented 4 months ago

We are working on implementing RSMP on our traffic light controller which itself is based on the Dutch iTLC architecture. This means that we don't work with index numbers for signal groups, detectors, inputs and outputs. This in turn means that the mapping between RSMP and our TLC is ambiguous. We might have a detector called "B120" but no way of knowing what index that might have, since our TLC does not refer to any of these objects by any index numbers but solely by name. One possibility is just sorting alphabetically and assigning index numbers based on that. But it's ambiguous without additional knowledge and signal groups or inputs or outputs might jump around after configuration change.

Therefore we propose that the TLC SXL should contain a status request that could give names to fields in S0001, S0002, S0003 and S0004 so that mapping between an RSMP index number and the equivalent object's name at the TLC's end can be established.

From my perspective it looks like the whole TLC SXL has been designed solely from the point of view of Swarco ITC and should be expanded to more vendor neutral way.

otterdahl commented 4 months ago

To give some historical context: The first version of the SXL was released back in 2010. At that time only three manufacturers were active in Sweden (Swarco, Dynniq and TTS). We tried to design the SXL to be as easy as possible for those manufacturers to support RSMP based on what we knew back then.

Since we work on making RSMP more of an international standard and as more manufacturers work on implementing support we have learned a lot. We should of course try to broaden our perspective.

I agree that adding names is a good idea. I think we should try to design it in such a way that it works in a vendor neutral way. Perhaps we should start working on a proposal.

SwarcoPalm commented 4 months ago

Hi Mikko

Congratulations on the launch of your controller.

I’m unsure how you would then handle empty names in Ivera, which must be referenced by their numeric index (at least from a CCOL)

Pretty much every protocol I can think of makes use of indexes for groups, detectors and I/Os. So I would suggest it is a nut you will need to crack in any case.

Other than that I think it would be great to be able to transfer the names from the controller program where available, to make it easier to display and keep in sync on the central system.

BR Anders

mr-entropia commented 4 months ago

I'm glad to see you agree on the usefulness of naming. I'd be happy to assist with specification work if necessary.

Anders, Thanks. IVERA is indeed part of the iTLC but it is optional and we have no concrete plans of supporting it. But you are correct, the index numbering scheme is used there as well. I'm not very familiar with CCOL, but as far as I understand, if it is used, it will be connected via TLC-FI and it is the CCOL implementors task to figure out the indexing part.

emiltin commented 4 months ago

We had a discussion closely related to this in https://github.com/rsmp-nordic/rsmp_sxl_traffic_lights/issues/187. See also https://github.com/rsmp-nordic/rsmp_core/issues/166.