ENABLING REUSABILITY OF A SPACECRAFT DESIGN TOOLSET VIA MBSE

Abstract

As technology advances, so does the complexity of engineering projects. Systems en- gineering has evolved with these technological advances as a means of coping with this complexity. Traditionally, systems engineers use separate documents to track all project in- formation. This trend continues today, as projects are becoming more complex than before and the traditional document based approach is now seen as time consuming and error prone. Model based Systems engineering (MBSE) is a systems engineering approach that seeks to incorporate all project information into a single source of truth that can be thought of as a model. However, there are several challenges that face widespread MBSE adoption, includ- ing data transfer incompatibilities between MBSE and engineering discipline models. These incompatibilities are a major focus of this thesis. One goal of this thesis is to demonstrate the addition of a translation framework between MBSE and the Modeling Architectures and Parameterization for Spacecraft (MAPS) environment. The translation framework takes information read from System Modeling Language (SysML) diagrams and converts it into a representation suitable for the MAPS environment. Adding a translation framework en- ables more rapid analysis of different architectures and allows more users to interact with the MAPS environment. This thesis also seeks a method by which to evaluate MBSE and systems engineering tools. A qualitative framework is created based on rigor in systems en- gineering. The rigor evaluation framework specifically targets weaknesses commonly found in MBSE to enable users to find better directions for these tools. The effectiveness of the translation framework is shown via a demonstration case. Additionally, the rigor evalua- tion framework is applied to the translation framework. This application results in several recommendations for improvements and demonstrates the evaluation framework’s ability to find and address problem areas in MBSE tools.