Combining System Modelling and Graph Databases to Improve Access and Analysis in Data-Intensive Engineering Tasks

System Modelling and Graph Databases have evolved as the means of choice for handling information in many tasks in engineering and data science respectively. While each technique has its individual background and strengths in either the visually assisted creation or the easy integration into external processes, data-intensive engineering tasks like the planning of new aircraft cabins for the cabin-retrofit in aviation would greatly benefit from an approach that facilitates both aspects. Generic information of the domain and information specific to the individual aircraft need to be easily documented but also quickly tracked down and accessed to ensure a proper fit between the new cabin and the existing aircraft. Hence, this paper will present an approach to combine System Modelling techniques with Graph Databases to improve the access and analysis of the occurring information in these data-intensive tasks. As part of that, the required fundamentals of the respective techniques are described and compared. Benefits and limitations as well as the potential of the combination are presented and result in a methodology that facilitates improved handling of information under the given circumstances. While the general idea can also be applied to other scenarios, the aforementioned use case of cabin-retrofit in aviation will be used as the case study of the presented methodology.