A Digital Engineering Workbench for Collaborative Air Vehicle Design

Air transport faces growing demands in terms of competitiveness, climate compatibility, safety, and security. To comprehensively evaluate innovative air vehicle solutions meeting these demands, the systematic and comprehensive integration of all aspects of the vehicle’s lifecycle is required. Within this work, a digital engineering workbench for collaborative air vehicle design is introduced, combining concepts from the fields of model-based systems engineering (MBSE) and multidisciplinary design, analysis and optimization (MDAO). To cope with the complexity of the supporting design process, the workbench targets the seamless interconnection of capabilities within and in-between the modeling phases of the vehicle design process: system identification, specification, architecting, and synthesis. Employing the integrating features of semantic web technologies, a robust digital backbone is being developed to intricately link the phases by means of a digital thread – a structured and interconnected representation of the models, data, information and knowledge within the design process. The aspects and development of this fundamental capability are elaborated upon, supported by two implementation examples. The first shows a competence map on the organization level of the design process, providing insights in whether all necessary competences are covered within a design team. Building the foundation for automated requirements validation, the second shows the interconnection of an MBSE-based requirements model to numerical vehicle performance parameters obtained from MDAO analyses, essentially linking organization and vehicle design level. Although establishing the digital engineering workbench is an ongoing process, its current implementation already proves valuable in enhancing transparency, reducing the amount of error-prone repetitive integration tasks and has large potential in decreasing the duration of the design process.