Cognitive Digital Thread for Intelligent Traceability Establishment in Model-Based Systems Engineering

Traceability plays an important role in model-based systems engineering (MBSE) practices, which helps engineers to ensure information consistency and correct constraint propagation throughout the system lifecycle. However, intelligently establishing trace links between heterogeneous models still faces several challenges, including those from tool interoperability and their inner scale complexity. To address these challenges, this paper employs a Cognitive Digital Thread (CDT) to develop a tool-chain to support intelligent trace links establishment between MBSE models. The CDT tool-chain first transform model information into unified services for tool interoperability using the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) standard. After that, a traceability engine are developed to intelligently capture and establish trace links based on model semantics in the proposed CDT tool-chain. A case study based on the design of a landing gear system demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed CDT tool-chain. The result of the case study indicates that the proposed CDT tool-chain improves the scalability and efficiency when establishing trace links between different MBSE models.