Building a Semantic Layer for Early Design Trade Studies in the Development of Commercial Aircraft

To improve the adoption of Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE), data that is distributed across engineering disciplines needs to be made available in an open and descriptive way. This paper describes a new approach to implementing a semantic layer that allows integrating and publishing MBSE data stored in heterogeneous models in a uniform way by means of Semantic Web technologies. The tool-independent views on engineering data provided by the semantic layer enable the implementation of services for accessing, classifying, checking and reuse of federated information. We report on the creation of a common vocabulary in the Ontology Modeling Language (OML) that can be automatically instantiated from distributed models into a knowledge graph. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach using a Systems Modeling Language (SysML) based early design trade study in the aeronautics domain.