VF13ad for the General Mission Analysis Tool (GMAT)
---------------------------------------------------
Provided by Thinking Systems, Inc.
www.thinksysinc.com


Release:  R2025a
Status:   Production

Platforms Checked:
   Windows 11
   Ubuntu 22.04
   Centos 7
   Red Hat 8
   
   Preliminary:
      macOS 14 (Sonoma)

Please provide comments, questions, or issues to:  darrel.conway@thinksysinc.com


License:  HSL - Incorporation Licence Agreement

          Binary copies are licensed for distribution under an HSL
          Incorporation License Agreement between Thinking Systems and
          The Science and Technology Facilities Council, as part of United
          Kingdom Research and Innovation, one of whose principal office is
          at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell Oxford.

          HSL is a collection of Fortran codes for large-scale scientific 
          computation.  See http://www.hsl.rl.ac.uk/

          Thinking Systems appreciates assistance from HSL to make this 
          component available to the GMAT user community.

The code for the plugin interfaces, absent HSL's code, is available on request,
licensed using the Apache 2 license.


Installation
------------
VF13ad is provided as a GMAT plugin component for Windows, Linux, and Mac 
systems.  Installation is straightforward:

  + Unpack the VF13ad package.  If you are reading this file, you probably
    did this already.

  + Move or copy the "thinksys" folder into the GMAT "plugins" folder

    Thinking Systems recommends placing the shared library in a subfolder 
    of the GMAT plugins folder to distinguish the plugins built outside of
    the GMAT installation from those inclused in the build from NASA.  The
    default folder for plugins from Thinking Systems is "thinksys."  

  + Edit the GMAT startup file, gmat_startup_file.txt, located in the GMAT 
    bin folder, adding the line

        PLUGIN = ../plugins/thinksys/libVF13adOptimizer

    to the file, changing the path as needed.

    The GMAT startup file includes a section labeled "# External plugins."   
    This section provides a convenient location for plugins built outside of
    the standard GMAT plugin components.

Testing the Installation
------------------------
If the installation succeeded, the optimizer will be available as an optimizer
in GMAT's Solvers | Optimizers options.  Test the installation by opening GMAT
and checking for that option.  

When the VF13ad optimizer is installed, each of the scripts in GMAT's 
samples/NeedVF13ad folder can be run.  This folder provides both a good set of 
test cases for the installation and a set of scripts that show how to use the 
optimizer.
