Distinguish tasks in SimulationBaseClass by their host process and not just by their names

[bbercoviciUspace]

Hi everyone,

The AddModelToTask method of SimulationBaseClass inserts a newly created task in a list container (self.TaskList) holding all of the existing processes' tasks. Since tasks are only sorted by name, this prevents having two tasks in distinct processes sharing the same task name.

I think there are use cases where this feature would make a lot of sense though. For instance, in the context of simulating a constellation featuring N identical spacecraft whose GNC FSW and simulated physics are packaged in distinct processes (for instance 'spacecraft_1_gnc_process', 'spacecraft_1_sim_process', 'spacecraft_2_gnc_process', 'spacecraft_2_sim_process' ...), I think the current architecture would impose to prepend the name of each task
with a spacecraft_i_ identifier string so as to distinguish the tasks from one another. This adds extra verbosity where it would seem sufficient to simply recognize that tasks have distinct parent processes and can thus be solely identified through this lineage (hence there is no need to go as far as making all the task names distinct).

What is your thought on this ?

Thanks !

[schaubh]

Mm, I'm not a fan of having tasks with the same name. I'm not seeing any real advantage, rather I see many cases where this could lead to hard to debug errors.