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Introduction

Engineering concept and design methodologies have been constantly evolving, in a never-ending effort to address different challenges present in many engineering processes: lack of traceability and inconsistencies in documentation, lack of communication and understanding in the team are only a few.

This paper discusses how modern day technology, such as a web-based software stack, could bring the ultimate solution to these issues, in the form of a fully integrated engineering platform, a living organism that is constantly updated and shared between all the actors involved in the design process. In particular, it is presented and discussed how a team of students reacted and performed when presented with a systems engineering challenge to be solved using web-based software to collaborate concurrently in a limited time frame.

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Data-Driven Systems Engineering

All the new available tools on the scene remain somehow scattered and hard to integrate into a whole, fluent, organic apparatus. Documents remain at the centre of the scene, and even when digitalised they keep presenting similar inconsistencies and traceability issues, due to the high number of versions and the regular use of mere copy-pasting to update them. In traditional document-based engineering, data are shared in a manner that leaves space to errors, repetitions and use of non-updated values.

Present day information technology could make the systems engineering tools smarter. Systems which unify data sources and allow project managing and document generation in an efficient way without losing traceability could save companies great amounts of time, effort and money.

In DDSE, engineering design data and the associated connections constitute the foundation of the systems engineering process. Data are collected into a single database, available concurrently to all engineers working on a certain product or project. A software “stack” is now available for the modern engineer, to work in a fully integrated environment where links and servers substitute copy and paste and folders.

DDSE means:

  • consistency of engineering values
  • automation
  • traceability and transparency
  • optimisation

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The workshop

A university workshop was organised to observe the capabilities and weaknesses of DDSE, when presented to a group of students that are asked to collaborate and work concurrently in a short time frame.

The engineering tool mainly used by the students was the software Valispace, which provided a repository for all the data shared by the students during the experiment. Valispace is a web-based software tool where students could create system architectures of components and subcomponents, each with parameters that were linked between each other

After an introduction on systems engineering, the workshop consists of a practical example of the engineering design process for space missions. The students are presented with a subject that has seen a growing interest in recent times: a Lunar surface base. The activity is composed of two main parts: one is dedicated to the “system of systems” architecture, and the other is focused on “system-level” design. The group of students, divided into teams of 4 to 6 people, are asked to collaborate to complete the workshop’s assignments, described in a "engineering manual”.

The first part of the workshop is dedicated to the conception of a system of systems architecture of a Lunar base. This section is intended to stimulate the team members’ creativity: students are invited to discuss the main objectives of their mission, the role of crew members and a first concept of operations. As output of this part they are asked to provide a product tree of the mission building blocks, producing very preliminary versions of their mass and power budgets.

In the second part, dedicated to sizing subsystems, the students perform the preliminary design of four interdependent systems. Inside each team, duties are distributed and the sizing procedures are performed, following the provided instructions which also include some cross-referenced values, pressuring the team to communicate and collaborate.

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Results

In each of the organised events, a qualitative evaluation of the workshop and of the software provided was performed by the organisers.

Students overall expressed positive opinions on the format chosen for the workshop, as they enjoyed the collaborative work, and the web-based software was praised for its capability to easily share and modify data, creating and updating documentation at the same time. Results were overall good throughout the teams, although teams with some previous knowledge had an easier understanding of the processes and were able to use better the DDSE method.

Negative comments were referred mostly on the nature of the exercise, where not much space was left for creativity and the required operations resulted sometimes repetitive. The DDSE approach received some criticism especially for its web_based nature: some communication issues with the servers where data is stored forced the team to stop and represented an obstacle in their operations.

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Conclusions

The advantages of concurrent design techniques have proved successful in supporting the design of complex systems.

New design methodologies, dynamical and flexible, seem likely to better adapt to the coming years of industrial progress; web-based platforms embrace the concepts of concurrency and real-time engineering, and will likely be the best environment to develop the projects of the future.

A workshop like the one described in this research project represents a learning experience for the participants, who become aware of what real-life cases might look like in a work and research environment, and is crucial to understand the potential of the DDSE methodology.

The potential of such an intuitive way to see data is clear: students of today are the engineers of tomorrow, and they come from generations that have a completely different relationship with technology. Results have shown that users were in general very positive towards new dynamic, visual and intuitive engineering tools, and they managed to obtain relevant results in a very limited time.

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