NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Virtual System Design Environment

The Virtual System Design Environment (VSDE) is one of a number of initiatives under development through NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's (GSFC's) Advanced Engineering Services and Environments (AESE) Office. The AESE Science Team, a broad cross section of Earth and space scientists, identified needs and challenges they face in their daily work and collaboration with GSFC engineers. Prominent amid these challenges were the tasks and the engineering support necessary to effectively perform system concept (mission, instrument and science measurement concepts) development and formulation. They identified that the work and collaborative efforts with other scientists, engineers, and team members who are geographically distributed could be significantly enhanced, greatly increasing science value. The VSDE users are scientists, engineers, team leaders and project managers, working on system development efforts. The VSDE has been developed in close collaboration with these customers and users. The initial deployment has focused on supporting a collaborative design activity to modify a spacecraft structural component Use of VSDE facilitates capturing the effects within other subsystems through the VSDE portal notification mechanism while maintaining configuration management and version control over the entire design cycle. In this case, engineers used both the collaboration services such as white boarding to mark up 3-D Computer Aided Design (CAD) models, and analysis tools, such as Matlab and ProE, within the VSDE Portal environment to collaborate on the design problem In this paper we present the VSDE project system capabilities and technologies, a case study and the tools used, and provide a discussion of metrics collected during the initial deployment to feature user feedback, design cycle time savings, and current as well as future capabilities.