Systems Engineering for the Digital Age

Chapter 3Transforming Systems Engineering Through Integrating Modeling and Simulation and the Digital Thread

Daniel Dunbar, Tom Hagedorn, Timothy D. West, Brian Chell, John Dzielski, and Mark R. Blackburn

Stevens Institute of Technology, School of Systems and Enterprises, Hoboken, NJ, USA

Introduction

While discipline‐specific modeling and simulation have enabled immense gains in efficiency and computation, broader design and analysis tasks that must reach across disciplines and individual models to a broader system context often rely on manual transfer of data or direct tool‐to‐tool integration, which is brittle in nature (Bone et al. 2019). The chapter discusses digital engineering (DE) in the broadest way, and the accompanying authoritative source of truth (AST) seek to enable better collaboration between all types of models not only for individual system design and analysis tasks but across the entire life cycle of the system, including mission, system, and subsystem levels of abstraction. This chapter details efforts using graph data structures and ontology aligned data as an AST to enable cross model collaboration in a way that addresses current challenges in the process while building a foundation for future advances.

The structure of the chapter is as follows: the Background and Motivating Use Case gives some background on modeling, simulation, and the concept of the Digital Thread and introduces a catapult use case that is used throughout the chapter. The Integration ...