CostStructure & CostMapping

This article is based on planning group discussion on March 17, 2009.

Each Cost belongs to a certain CostType. Each Attribute has costs of multiple CostTypes. The CostManager maintains multiple CostCollections, each containing some costs. One example: 2 CostCollections - 1 containing optimization costs, and the other containing satisfaction costs.

The CostManager also has a CostMapping that transforms a CostValue provided by Actuator into another CostValue that it uses to prioritize and schedule costs. One example of scheduling: First, satisfaction costs are handled, then optimization (which might lead to non-satisfaction of some costs), then satisfaction, and so on.