DSS2 — Attribute Ownership Acquisition: increased prohibition

The introductory text to the Attribute Ownership Acquisition service says, "If a
specified instance attribute is owned by another joined federate, the RTI shall
invoke the Request Attribute Ownership Release † service for that instance
attribute at the owning joined federate."

This text should be replace with the following, "If a specified instance attribute
is owned by another joined federate, and that owning federate is in the "Not
Divesting" state with respect to the instance attribute, the RTI shall invoke the
Request Attribute Ownership Release † service for that instance attribute at the
owning joined federate. If a specified instance attribute is owned by another
joined federate, and that owning federate is in the "Waiting for a New Owner to be
Found" state with respect to the instance attribute, the RTI shall not invoke the
Request Attribute Ownership Release † service for that instance attribute at the
owning joined federate, but it shall invoke the Request Divestiture Confirmation †
service for that instance attribute at the owning joined federate."

Rationale: The text as originally written implies that if an owning federate is in
the "Waiting for a New Owner to be Found" state and another federate invokes the
Attribute Ownership Acquisition service, the owning federate will receive both a
Request Attribute Ownership Release † and a Request Divestiture Confirmation †
callback. Furthermore, a potentially large number of eligible federates could
invoke the Attribute Ownership Acquisition service. If many federates invoke the
Attribute Ownership Acquisition service, the owning federate will receive a
corresponding large number of Request Attribute Ownership Release † callbacks while
in the “Completing Divestiture” state, and these Request Attribute Ownership
Release † callbacks are useless. The expectation that the owning federate would
receive both the Request Divestiture Confirmation † callback and numerous useless
Request Attribute Ownership Release † callbacks is non-sensical. It requires
additional processing by both the RTI and the federate without providing any added
value. Furthermore, the standard already prohibits the mirror image of this
situation, which involves the question of whether a federate that is already in the
“Willing to Acquire” or “Acquisition Pending” state should receive equally useless
invocations of the Request Attribute Ownership Assumption † callback. Therefore, in
order for the “Owned” state of ownership management to be consistent with the
“Unowned” state of ownership management, and to eliminate unecessary inefficiency,
the text should be
changed as described above.

Furthermore, if this issue is accepted, the Request Attribute Ownership Release
transition in the statechart in Figure 15 needs to have a guard added to it that
says, “ [not in "Waiting for a New Owner to be Found" ^ not in "Completing
Divestiture"]”.

see above