A coordination method for concurrent design and a collaboration tool for parametric system models

Abstract

This work presents a method and a tool for conducting conceptual design studies for projects such as a space exploration mission and a satellite constellation in a concurrent manner in both time and space, while taking into account the structure of the system to design and the dependencies between the system's constituting elements. Design work is parallelized to reduce the time required to converge to a solution for a preliminary design, which includes the system architecture, its detailed requirements, and its costs. The multidisciplinary team of designers works in colocation to leverage effective direct human interaction for discussing design trade-offs quickly. While this is practice in space agencies for mission feasibility studies, a common methodology was not described so far. Our work proposes a method for the coordination of discipline experts and the sequence of activities performed during conceptual design studies, which use integrated parametric system models. Our method reduces the number of design iterations by applying a design structure matrix clustering algorithm to the system model and deriving a schedule for the design session. We also describe the tool Concurrent Engineering Data Exchange Skoltech we developed for collaborative work on the parametric system models and serve as an instrument for research on complex system design methodologies. The tool features a fast synchronization mechanism for the concurrent work of multiple design experts, and it supports our coordination method for concurrent design studies. The tool was published as open-source software, so other researchers can use it and build upon it. We used our tool and applied the method to two case studies of preliminary satellite designs and tested them with groups of students of a satellite engineering class and researchers from our institute. Throughout the experiments, we recorded information about user interactions and collected user feedback for the evaluation of the coordination method and the collaboration tool. Both method and tool demonstrated their validity in our experimental setting.

Study of Data Structures and Tools for the Concurrent Conceptual Design of Complex Space Systems

“…The European space community has published a technical memorandum [3] for standardizing the data exchange in order to foster interoperability among different tools. An instance of such a data exchange tool is CEDESK [4]. This tool is able to store parametric system models in accordance to [3].…”

“…As previously stated, the primary model entities in CEDESK represent the system structure, its parameters, units of measures, links between parameters, users, and roles [4]. The parameters can be of type input, output or state.…”

“…The extended SAPPhIRE model also explicitly represents the evolution of the system through iteration. This is part of the generic concurrent design process developed by [4], and covered in CEDESK data structure by keeping track of the change history of the parameters. This allows to reconstruct the evolution of design parameters over design iterations.…”

“…The systems breakdown structure was defined a-priori and the design dependencies among parts of the system preliminarily identified. [4]. Being a preliminary design each physical subsystem or logical element of the mission is described in basic parametric models.…”

Two-dimensional Pareto frontier forecasting for technology planning and roadmapping

“…Our proposed approach, being also visual, is suited for use in concurrent design studies, such as for technology roadmapping for example, where multiple experts convene and integrate their knowledge using models. The resulting framework is therefore suited for strategic planning and roadmapping and facilitates its future integration in a concurrent design data exchange platform such as CEDESK [7].…”