Proceedings of IDMME – Virtual Concept 2010 Bordeaux, France, October 20 – 22 2010 IDMME_P154 1 Copyright of IDMME – Virtual Concept Enabling Collaborative Conceptual Design for Space Systems Projects Walter A. Dos Santos 1 , Alan Hardwick 2 , Bruno B. F. Leonor 1 and Stephan Stephany 1 (1): INPE National Space Research Institute, Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil +55 12 3945 6622/ 3941 1890 E-Mail: walter@dss.inpe.br, brunobfl@yahoo.com.br, stephan@lac.inpe.br (2): Birkbeck College, School of Computer Science and Information Systems University of London, UK +44 130 671346 E-Mail: alan_hardwick@hotmail.com Abstract: Space systems engineering demand coordinated expertise from different disciplines. Furthermore, satellite systems are growing even more complex making conceptual design a key driver for cost and deadline. When poorly performed, various problems may arise. One solution is to underpin this project phase with a collaborative systems engineering environment and by adoption of a model-driven engineering approach (MDE) where models are the main artefact during system development. This work reports the development and application of a novel knowledge-based software tool, named SatBudgets, that employs satellite SysML (Systems Modelling Language) models and web services. This enables information reuse, collaboration and integration to deal with interdisciplinary nature of this problem domain in an extended enterprise environment. Key words: SOA, SysML, Systems Engineering, Information Reuse and Integration, Collaborative Work. 1 Introduction With advances in computer networking applications, recent interest in collaborative environments for supporting a large spectrum of workgroup activities has been rising in the literature. Space systems engineering require essentially multidisciplinary expertise ranging from onboard computing to launcher vehicle interfacing. This cooperation is made more difficult if the required expertise is spread across a number of sites, and is rendered even more so if the satellite is a multi-national collaboration. Factors such as time zone differences, language barriers, numbering and units of measurement conventions, and different IT platforms can all have an adverse effect on the project timeline and budget. As space system designs are growing more complex, technical issues related to concepts development, also referred as Phase A, become more important and difficult. Conceptual design maps client needs to product use functions and is where functional architecture (and sometimes the physical architecture) is decided upon. Typically, the design specifications and constraints impose a heavy burden on systems-of-systems engineering and particularly on requirements engineering which drives the whole system's life cycle. Henceforth, taking suitable decisions at this project phase ends up paying dividends with schedule, performance, cost and risk. This work is focused on the preliminary conceptual satellite design with computer-based information reuse and integration in order to deal with the interdisciplinary nature of the domain via an MDE approach implemented with SysML as a satellite architecture description language. This enables information reuse between different satellite projects as well as facilitating knowledge integration and management over systems engineering activities. For demonstration purposes, only the early budgeting workflow of conceptual design is illustrated in this work. This is performed using a novel knowledge based software tool, named SatBudgets [DL1]. SatBudgets uses XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) information exchange between a satellite SysML model and its initial requirements budgetings via a rule-based knowledge database captured from satellite subsystems experts. Furthermore, in order to enable collaboration among project partners, web services are directly invoked by SatBudgets. The work is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a short introduction to SysML as an architecture description language and Service Oriented Architectures. Section 3 surveys previous research in the area. Section 4 shows the SysML satellite modelling. Section 5 introduces the software tool SatBudgets and covers the Satellite Collaborative Systems Engineering. Section 6 describes further future work. Finally, Section 7 summarizes this research report. HOME