Many Minds, One Truth: A Concurrent Engineering Collaborative Tool in the Integrated Design Center

The Integrated Design Center (IDC) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is a concurrent engineering environment that facilitates multi-disciplinary collaborative space system engineering design and analysis activities to enable rapid development of science instrumentation, mission, and mission architecture concepts. IDC customers include internal research and development projects, GSFC scientists, universities, NASA Headquarters, and other government Agencies. The Mission Design Lab (MDL) within the Integrated Design Center (IDC) performs end-to-end orbital mission design and analysis making it an ideal test bed for Digital Engineering (DE) infusion. Its broad customer base and rapid design cycles facilitate a continuous improvement process that can fully leverage DE tools and yield a rapid and tangible return on investment. The vision for Digital Engineering in the MDL consists of tools that will enable the design and analysis of increasingly complex missions and move from a multi-disciplinary design process to an interdisciplinary design process. One of the first steps in that process is the development and use of the in-house Python-based software tool Collaborative Assistive Tool To Enable Novel Solutions (CATTENS). For several years, the MDL has utilized CATTENS to quickly build and update a spacecraft Master Equipment List (MEL) using an extensive and continuously updated hardware library with an intuitive drag and drop graphical interface. CATTENS has proven to be a successful tool in the MDL as a “single source of truth“ accessible to all lab disciplines. The ability to quickly build and update the MEL from existing templates and a component hardware library has saved engineering time and reduced errors in transcribing technical data from hardware data sheets. Dashboard displays showing subsystem hardware hierarchies and resource rack-ups ensure that all engineers are working to the same design baseline during concurrent engineering sessions. This has improved MDL product consistency across disciplines by ensuring that the work of all discipline engineers is synchronized into a master model. New CATTENS features developed this year are the Spacecraft Power Modes Definition Module and a Concept of Operations (Con-Ops) Modeler with time-domain power and data rate analysis capabilities. Drag and drop hardware changes propagate through the model and immediately update power and data rate analyses to allow quick trade assessments, on power system sizing and communication architectures. This paper will describe CATTENS software development and usage of CATTENS in the MDL, including technical approach, benefits, challenges, lessons learned as well as the path forward for connecting CATTENS to additional near-term Digital Engineering investments.