Weaving a Digital Thread into Concept Design

During concept design of a space system, engineers explore many alternative concepts of operation, requirements, and design solutions. Changes to all these attributes are made frequently. The models that represent the system's definition, properties, and performance must be integrated in a way that not only captures these key attributes in a consistent manner across the various model domains, but they must also be agile to allow for frequent changes to the concept design. Changes should propagate throughout the entire federation of interconnected models and maintain design consistency. To accomplish this, the models and tools used by different disciplines need to “talk” to each other to share data in a way that ultimately leads to informed decision-making. A model framework is presented that describes how interconnected descriptive and analytical models can be used for concept design. The analytical models are implemented by tools that help engineers visualize trade space options, analyze candidate designs, and compare results against requirements. These connected performance models also provide holistic system analyses used to verify that a proposed system concept design meets mission requirements. The outputs of these analytical models are input to a descriptive SysML model in the form of constraints that ultimately verify that a system's mission requirements are met, thus providing a traceable framework, or digital thread, which spans across disparate functional areas.