Innovative Flexible, Robust And Agile Digital Engineering Platform Development For Supporting Future Space Systems Acquisition

This paper provides an overview of Aerospace R&D work on digital engineering consistent with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) Digital Engineering Strategy encouraging innovation in rapid development of space systems. An objective of this investigation was to identify challenges associated with DE and to formulate an approach to mitigate the challenges. One key challenge within a larger enterprise is the fact that models will be developed by different developers/modelers, using different ontologies, different tools, and different levels of detail. Our approach introduced innovative techniques for connecting disparate DE models, defining/controlling system interfaces and defining/managing interface baseline specifications within a DE construct. The approach includes a proposed flexible, robust, and agile platform and associated implementation framework of processes, tools, digital models, digital threads and digital use cases. The approach is being submitted for U.S. patent application and was applied on a pilot project involving a spacecraft Bus, mission payload (P/L), and digitized PL-to-Bus interface.