Realizing Interoperability between MBSE Domains in Aircraft System Development

Abstract

Establishing interoperability is an essential aspect of the often-pursued shift towards Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) in, for example, aircraft development. If models are to be the primary information carriers during development, the applied methods to enable interaction between engineering domains need to be modular, reusable, and scalable. Given the long life cycles and often large and heterogeneous development organizations in the aircraft industry, a piece to the overall solution could be to rely on open standards and tools. In this paper, the standards Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) and System Structure and Parameterization (SSP) are exploited to exchange data between the disciplines of systems simulation and geometry modeling. A method to export data from the 3D Computer Aided Design (CAD) Software (SW) CATIA in the SSP format is developed and presented. Analogously, FMI support of the Modeling & Simulation (M&S) tools OMSimulator, OpenModelica, and Dymola is utilized along with the SSP support of OMSimulator. The developed technology is put into context by means of integration with the M&S methodology for aircraft vehicle system development deployed at Saab Aeronautics. Finally, the established interoperability is demonstrated on two different industrially relevant application examples addressing varying aspects of complexity. A primary goal of the research is to prototype and demonstrate functionality, enabled by the SSP and FMI standards, that could improve on MBSE methodology implemented in industry and academia.