Digital Twin-enabled MBSE Testbed for Prototyping and Evaluating Aerospace Systems: Lessons Learned

With increasing interconnectedness and complexity of aerospace systems and system-of-systems, it no longer suffices to perform experimentation and integration without an overarching framework to organize modeling, simulation, and analysis artifacts. With recent advances in Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), several key building blocks for such a framework are already in place. However, important challenges remain. No longer isolated MBSE tools can suffice without a flexible infrastructure to support model integration, tool interoperability, experimentation, and data collection. This recognition provides the impetus for developing a MBSE research testbed for prototyping and evaluating aerospace systems and system-of-systems. This paper presents progress made and lessons learned in the development of a MBSE research testbed for experimentation with aerospace systems such as multi-UAV swarms. Multi-UAV swarms are used in a variety of missions ranging from search and rescue and perimeter security of high value physical assets to emergency response and infrastructure inspection. These operations are characterized by adaptive coordination, ability to survive systemic malfunctions and unexpected external disruptions, ability to discern and reach safe states when attempting to cope with unknown disruptions, ability to course correct and continuously adapt in partially observable, reactive environments. This paper discusses the implementation of digital twin-enabled MBSE testbed which employs a smart dashboard to support experimentation with dynamic scenario execution, monitoring, visualization and control.