Funding did come through for the project and I am just starting the contract
paperwork process. Our plan is to bid the project out to the private sector,
with the hopes it can be done winter and early spring, so we have a model to
start testing in late spring/early summer. The way I foresee this "marriage"
working is that a user would interface with FVS or Suppose as with any of
our other variants, but the G&Y and volume routines would be ORGANON's. Once
we are satisfied that the product works as expected, we will maintain and
support the FVS code, and distribute the ORGANON DLL's with the FVS
executable. When the ORGANON DLL's are updated then we will update them in
our package as well, and update the FVS code if necessary. Obviously we will
not be able to provide support for the DLLs, but our expectation is that we
will support our portion of the product and any questions that specifically
relate to ORGANON's internal process will be forwarded on. Of course getting
this process to work, I imagine, will not be as simple as just getting the
calls to and from the models to work, there are a lot of details on the FVS
side, such as making sure the calls to the Event Monitor are sequencing at
the right time, cycle lengths, stochastic issues, FVS extensions, etc that
may or may not prove challenging in this process (essentially what do we
take out of FVS and what parts do we keep). But we are excited to move
forward and hope that this product proves useful to users.
If there are consultants at the meeting that may be interested in the
project, tell them to send me their contact information so that I can add
them to my mailing list as I start the contracting process.