Model-Based Engineering Design for Trade Space Exploration Throughout the Design Cycle

Abstract

This paper presents ongoing work to standardize model-based system engineering as a complement to point design development in the conceptual design phase of deep space missions. It summarizes two first steps towards practical application of this capability within the framework of concurrent engineering design teams and their customers. The first step is standard generation of system sensitivities models as the output of concurrent engineering design sessions, representing the local trade space around a point design. A review of the chosen model development process, and the results of three case study examples, demonstrate that a simple update to the concurrent engineering design process can easily capture sensitivities to key requirements. It can serve as a valuable tool to analyze design drivers and uncover breakpoints in the design. The second step is development of roughorder-of-magnitude, broad-range-of-validity design models for rapid exploration of the trade space, before selection of a point design. At least one case study demonstrated the feasibility to generate such models in a concurrent engineering session. The experiment indicated that such a capability could yield valid system-level conclusions for a trade space composed of understood elements. Ongoing efforts are assessing the practicality of developing end-to-end system-level design models for use before even convening the first concurrent engineering session, starting with modeling an end-to-end Mars architecture.

A Formal Representation of Software-Hardware System Design

“…Ensuring that such software-intensive systems operate properly requires that the software and the hardware are compatible with each other, reinforcing the need for concurrent design. Concurrent design environments have become common in industries that deal with large scale complex systems as a means to tackle the problem of generating requirements and producing conceptual designs that consist of multidisciplinary subsystems (e.g., Team X at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) [38,58]. Unfortunately, a true concurrent design approach between the hardware and software developers is not easily realized.…”

Iterative and Incremental Development Analysis Study of Vocational Career Information Systems

“…The SDM contains several phases that a system analyst followed in the analysis and design of quality software product or system (Lamassoure, 2004;Iqbal and Idrees, 2017). The SDM helps in determining the order of the stages and to establish the transition criteria (Boehm, 1988).…”

Effect of Model Element Fidelity Within a Complex Function-Based Behavioral Model

“…As a result, both activities have been widely researched in order to understand not only their nature but also potential methods of ensuring their success [1][2][3][4][5]. In recent years, the use of models to assist performing these tasks has been recommended as demonstrated in the model-based conceptual design work proposed in [6] and the integratedsystem level optimization work presented in [7]. In [7], the case is made that the current models used for system-level optimization are generally custom-made and quite complex.…”