The DLR developed the open source software framework RCE to support the collaborative and distributed work in the shipyard industry. From a technology side of view a software from the shipbuilding field has many requirements in common with aerospace software projects. Accordingly, RCE has become the basis for further projects within the DLR. Over the last years of usage a subset of frequently used software components could be derived and are provided by the RCE framework. In particular, the workflow engine, allowing the integration of different domain-specific tools from local and remote locations into one overall calculation has become important for various projects. We present RCE and show how its software components are reused in two aerospace applications.

Design information of a spacecraft is collected over all phases in the lifecycle of a project. A lot of this information is exchanged between different engineering tasks and business processes. In some lifecycle phases Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) has introduced system models and databases that help to organize such information and to keep it consistent for everyone. Nevertheless, none of the existing databases approached the whole lifecycle yet. Virtual Satellite is the MBSE database developed at DLR. It has been used for quite some time in Phase A studies and is currently extended for implementing it in the whole lifecycle of spacecraft projects. Since it is unforeseeable which future use cases such a database needs to support in all these different projects, the underlying data model has to provide tailoring and extension mechanisms to its Conceptual Data Model (CDM). This paper explains the mechanisms as they are implemented in Virtual Satellite, which enables extending the CDM along the project without corrupting already stored information. As an upcoming major use case, Virtual Satellite will be implemented as MBSE tool in the S2TEP project. This project provides a new satellite bus for internal research and several different payload missions in the future. This paper explains how Virtual Satellite will be used to manage configuration control problems associated with such a multi-mission platform. It discusses how the S2TEP project starts using the software for collecting the first design information from concurrent engineering studies, then making use of the extension mechanisms of the CDM to introduce further information artefacts such as functional electrical architecture, thus linking more and more processes into an integrated MBSE approach.

The concurrent engineering (CE) approach has been successfully applied to the early design phase of space missions. During CE sessions, a software support is needed to allow multidisciplinary design data exchange. At the moment, a spreadsheet-based solution enhanced with macros is used at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) to create a system model of a space mission during the early design phase. Now there is an increasing demand to take advantage of this system model and provide data analysis features which improve the decision making during CE sessions. Since the current approach is limited for such analysis, DLR has started developing a new tool called Virtual Satellite. It offers extended software support required by the Concurrent Engineering Facility of DLR in Bremen. On top of the previous spreadsheet functionalities, it provides means for online data analysis and system modeling. The results of these data analyses are presented to the discipline experts using different views which help in performing an early design optimization. In this paper, the impact of these views on the decision making during the AEGIS space mission study is presented as a proof of concept.