A large delegation of Starion’s digital engineering experts participated in this week’s MBSE 2024 Workshop held in Bremen, Germany, on 28-29 May, with sponsors including the European Space Agency (ESA).
Gwendolyn Kolfschoten, Starion Concurrent Design Expert, presents the key takeaways.
Day 1 had a focus on the strategy for model-based system engineering (MBSE) and the need to speed up the transition to adopt and use MBSE in the space industry.
While many organisations are ‘exploring’ MBSE, and pioneering and developing state-of-the-art solutions to enhance MBSE, large-scale adoption of the approach is challenging. Causes that were discussed include: a lack of visualisation; lack of knowledge and system engineering expertise in the organisation; a lack of (applicable) processes; difficulties with ‘legacy’; and the need to involve stakeholders who demand documents. While the audience was collectively convinced of the benefits of MBSE, it’s commonly understood that the transition is challenging.
Day 2 focused more on innovations and advanced solutions for MBSE. We got to see the first pioneering implementations of the SysML v2 modelling language, as well as solutions to use MBSE throughout the life cycle for tasks such as reliability, availability, maintainability and safety (RAMS) and failure mode, effects and criticality analysis (FMECA).
Starion contributors
Our Starion colleagues and partners presented four papers and two posters:
Dr Anh Toan Bui Long, Concurrent Design and MBSE Expert, presented our work on ‘The ESA SysML solution evolution, introducing verification and interface management’. This paper presents an MBSE methodology based on ECSS and the SysML v1 language.
Alex Vorobiev, Project Delivery Manager MBSE and Concurrent Engineering BE, presented a paper on ‘Lessons learned from software implementation of the Model Based Engineering Hub based on the Space System Ontology’. The presentation discussed the architecture of the MBSE Hub that Starion and partners developed, and addressed lessons learned about sharing complex system models across tools and platforms.
Paloma Maestro Redondo, System Engineer and Project Manager, presented our work on an ‘Implementation of an AI powered digital assistant to support space system engineering activities’. Her presentation demonstrated the AI application Starion developed together with Strathclyde University and Thales Alenia Space to support automated requirements verification.
Finally, consultant Hans Peter de Koning presented our work on ‘Digitalization of the thermal engineering processes’. With this presentation, we gained insights on how to link domain-specific tools to the overall system models, and how data can be aligned between detailed domain applications and system representations.
Poster presentations
Next we presented our poster about ‘Enhancing product assurance processes though MBSE’, which demonstrates our data architecture for product assurance in light of the Space System Ontology.
Finally we presented a poster about ‘Supporting model-based reviews in a concurrent environment for non-expert modellers’. In this presentation we demonstrated a web application that presents an MBSE model in specific views tailored to supporting concurrent reviewing of the model.
Future MBSE
Overall, this was a very fruitful and interesting event in which we learned a lot from our colleagues and partners in the MBSE sector, and we look forward to contributing to this exciting domain in the future.
Find out more:
- Starion’s MBSE services and solutions
- Starion’s concurrent design capabilities
- CDP4-COMET – a powerful platform for concurrent design
