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At least 163 records · Page 9

Analysis of Input from Wildfire Incident Experts to Identify Key Risks and Hazards in Wildfire Emergency Response

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) describes wildland fires as, “a force of nature that can be nearly as impossible to prevent, and as difficult to control, as hurricanes, tornadoes and floods.” Existing challenges in managing wildland fires often put first responders’ lives at risk. The emergence of drones and their capabilities to supplement human efforts could alleviate some, if not all, of those risks that first responders face during wildfire management efforts. However, the process of adding drones to wildfire response has come with its own challenges as well. NASA’s System-Wide Safety Project is working towards overcoming these challenges to enable routine transfer of risk from responders to aviation assets. The concept of operations and model-based systems engineering (MBSE) effort for this shift is underway. To inform and to validate the MBSE effort, we delivered a questionnaire to wildland firefighting experts on the hazards they currently face. This questionnaire has given us insight and a better understanding of the challenges related to the use of drones from a first responder’s point of view. We are using this information to better address responders’ concerns, develop a safety management system, and eliminate the roadblocks that prevent the use of drones in wildfire management.

Wildfire↗

UAM Airspace Research Roadmap - Rev. 2.0

The UAM Airspace research roadmap is being developed as a new System Engineering methodology leveraging Model Based System Engineering (MBSE) capabilities to help organize, integrate, and communicate NASA's UAM airspace research, with the goal of evolving UAM airspace to UML-4. It provides a basis for prioritizing and coordinating research efforts, and for integrating results that build towards NASA’s research goals. Version 2.0 is a baseline version of the roadmap, shared publicly to serve as a focal point for discussion and feedback. This version supersedes earlier publications, and will be superseded itself by later versions.

UAM↗

Requirement Discovery Using Embedded Knowledge Graph with ChatGPT

- NASA’s Air Traffic Management-Exploration (ATM-X) Urban Air Mobility (UAM) Airspace Subproject is conducting research that evolves UAM airspace towards a highly automated and operationally flexible system of the future. - (see https://www.nasa.gov/uam-overview/ for more information) - The complexity of UAM airspace, and its evolution through a series of transformative epochs, requires a planning tool to effectively organize, integrate, and communicate the research that will guide the evolution of UAM operations in the National Airspace System (NAS). - The planning tool, called the UAM airspace research roadmap (or just roadmap), is being developed as a new system engineering methodology leveraging model based system engineering (MBSE) and artificial intelligence capabilities. This presentation gives an overview of the Knowledge Graph and ChatGPT applications within this system engineering methodology and will describe how it is being used to meet the ATM-X UAM Airspace Subproject’s overarching research goals.

systems engineering↗

ExMC Digital Engineering

Future missions beyond Artemis II will become increasingly complex as multiple vehicles (e.g., Gateway, Human Landing System (HLS), and Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program (EHP)), each having their own Program requirements and other associated documentation, which will need to be integrated into a single mission. Currently, the Human Health and Performance Directorate (HHPD)Program Support Teams mostly use documents to manage, perform, and archive their analyses. Identifying an opportunity for efficiency, ExMC demonstrated the ability to utilize MagicDraw, a Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) tool, as a requirements database with traceability, dependencies, and relationships in one place. Rather than existing in documents, emails, and historical knowledge, ExMC pursued a Digital Engineering (DE) effort in coordination with HHPD by combining MBSE tools with other digital platforms to manage and develop user-defined databases and interfaces. This DE approach is aimed to simplify processes and reduce risk through the unification of requirements into a centralized digital network, improving collaboration, decision-making, and transparency compared to isolated documents and knowledge. However, manipulating data views and content in MagicDraw requires a steep learning curve not needed by all users and even the user-friendly web view comes with downsides due to the static views. To provide a more dynamic user interface, ExMC investigated the use of Microsoft Power Platform which does not require as steep of a learning curve to become proficient. This introduces analytics to the DE infrastructure, offering customizable and dynamic data dashboards. ExMC continues developing these dashboards and tailoring the DE infrastructure in alignment with HHPD workforce needs.

M Krihak↗

MBSE for the Gateway Program

The Gateway Program and many of its module developers are using Magic Draw to coordinate functions, requirements, and interfaces between the various elements that make up the Gateway Platform. This also extends to the visiting vehicles (Human Lander System, Logistics Module, and Orion). The Propulsion and Power Element (PPE) is using Magic Draw to coordinate the design activities at NASA GRC (Glenn Research Center) and the contractor. This discussion will provide an overview of the MBSE (Model-Based Systems Engineering) efforts and how we are interfacing the various MBSE models into a single integrated model.

Systems Engineering↗

Modeling NASA’s Procedural Requirement Processes - Implications for Digital Future

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has an ongoing Digital Transformation effort and to leverage and showcase the power of Digital Transformation, an effort is underway to develop an integrated, datacentric, model representing NASA’s key process requirements. The task was divided into three phases: As Is modeling, Analysis, and To Be Planning. As part of this effort, a team has completed the first Phase I of the modeling task and is nearing completion of the second phase. This effort will capture the key elements as requirements, responsibilities, allocations, roles, products, and associated lifecycle elements. The scope of modeling included NASA’s NPR 7120.5 (Project and Program Management), NPR 7123.1 (Systems Engineering) and NPRs 8705.2 (Risk classification for Robotic Missions) and 8705.4 (Human-Rating Requirements for Space Missions). This paper will summarize the approach, scope, parsing patterns applied, metamodel, and associated workflows for the As-Is modeling. It will also summarize the results and insights gleaned during that phase, including the review process. These insights have informed the analysis and will be discussed. The analysis modeling phase will also be summarized including how the stakeholders were engaged, how the common elements were handled and dispositioned, and will also describe some of the plans for the future of NASA NPDs and NPRs.

Systems Engineering↗

Artemis III and IV Crew Health and Performance System Model Development

To maintain Crew Health and Performance (CHP) during an Artemis mission, the NASA Human Research Program (HRP) and Exploration Medical Capabilities (ExMC) element recognize the challenge that many different vehicles, habitats, and operational groups must come together to develop and implement cross program capabilities. To address this challenge, the ExMC team created the prototype 2023 Artemis CHP System Model to analyze how human system requirements are implemented throughout an Artemis mission and help understand the effects of changing an individual vehicle or habitat requirement on a full mission. Since presenting this work at the 2024 HRP Investigators’ Workshop, ExMC has continued this effort, now called the Artemis III and IV CHP System Model, to better support its operational end users within the NASA Human Health and Performance Directorate (HHPD) workforce. In this presentation, we will recapitulate how visualizing requirements and their relationships using a Model-Based Systems Engineering approach (MBSE) serves to improve understanding of an Artemis mission’s CHP capabilities along with discussion on updates made to the model to increase accessibility for users within HHPD so that it may be used in the development of cross program CHP capabilities at NASA.

Crew Health and Performance↗

A Principled Approach to the Specification of System Architectures for Space Missions

Modern space systems are increasing in complexity and scale at an unprecedented pace. Consequently, innovative methods, processes, and tools are needed to cope with the increasing complexity of architecting these systems. A key systems challenge in practice is the ability to scale processes, methods, and tools used to architect complex space systems. Traditionally, the process for specifying space system architectures has largely relied on capturing the system architecture in informal descriptions that are often embedded within loosely coupled design documents and domain expertise. Such informal descriptions often lead to misunderstandings between design teams, ambiguous specifications, difficulty in maintaining consistency as the architecture evolves throughout the system development life cycle, and costly design iterations. Therefore, traditional methods are becoming increasingly inefficient to cope with ever-increasing system complexity. We apply the principles of component-based design and platform-based design to the development of the system architecture for a practical space system to demonstrate feasibility of our approach using SysML. Our results show that we are able to apply a systematic design method to manage system complexity, thus enabling effective data management, semantic coherence and traceability across different levels of abstraction in the design chain. Just as important, our approach enables interoperability among heterogeneous tools in a concurrent engineering model based design environment.

platform-based design↗

Hydrodynamic Test Requirements Process Improvements

Hydrodynamic testing at Los Alamos National Laboratory would benefit from a process improvement for the requirements process. Cameo was used as a digital solution for requirements management to allow Lead Engineers to track requirements more effectively. This was identified as a process improvement throughout this Capstone project. This report includes a project proposal, business case, literature review, methodology, project plan, data analysis, decision-making report, financial analysis report, discussion, and conclusion. Initially, this project focused on figuring out a solution for the hydrotest requirement process improvements. The scope narrowed to focus on the use of Cameo for requirement capture and management. During this Capstone, four tests had digital models produced for requirements management in Cameo. The initial model was the baseline, with core requirements used across the tests. Commonalities in tests were used and the core requirements allowed for process efficiencies. In the data analysis, it was seen that overall, the implementation of using Cameo for requirements resulted in a decreasing trend for both schedule and normalized cost. Tests have different complexity levels which is also a factor in how long the requirements process will take. Additional data is needed to continue analyzing process improvements. Through decisionmaking and financial analysis, the recommendation was to use Cameo for requirements process improvement. Multiple experts provided feedback for requirements that were then captured within models. Numerous tangible and intangible benefits were identified with this process improvement. For return on investment, the metric of success was schedule reduction, which was overall seen. Four tests were analyzed, so future analysis will be needed. There is also not a great financial risk because the main cost would be purchasing more licenses. Individuals must generate requirements whether using this software or not. Overall, training is needed to help improve the skillsets of Lead Engineers but is already being supported on a regular frequency. A desktop guide was started associated with explaining the process, however, it is a work in progress. The team plans on adding additional information in the digital models to help status when requirements are met using verification methods and artifacts. From working on this project an improved understanding of Cameo and requirements was the result. There are future opportunities to extend the usage for requirements management and progress will continue after this project.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

A Tool for Model-Based Generation of Scenario-driven Electric Power Load Profiles

Power consumption during all phases of spacecraft flight is of great interest to the aerospace community. As a result, significant analysis effort is exerted to understand the rates of electrical energy generation and consumption under many operational scenarios of the system. Previously, no standard tool existed for creating and maintaining a power equipment list (PEL) of spacecraft components that consume power, and no standard tool existed for generating power load profiles based on this PEL information during mission design phases. This paper presents the Scenario Power Load Analysis Tool (SPLAT) as a model-based systems engineering tool aiming to solve those problems. SPLAT is a plugin for MagicDraw (No Magic, Inc.) that aids in creating and maintaining a PEL, and also generates a power and temporal variable constraint set, in Maple language syntax, based on specified operational scenarios. The constraint set can be solved in Maple to show electric load profiles (i.e. power consumption from loads over time). SPLAT creates these load profiles from three modeled inputs: 1) a list of system components and their respective power modes, 2) a decomposition hierarchy of the system into these components, and 3) the specification of at least one scenario, which consists of temporal constraints on component power modes. In order to demonstrate how this information is represented in a system model, a notional example of a spacecraft planetary flyby is introduced. This example is also used to explain the overall functionality of SPLAT, and how this is used to generate electric power load profiles. Lastly, a cursory review of the usage of SPLAT on the Cold Atom Laboratory project is presented to show how the tool was used in an actual space hardware design application.

power load profile↗

An MBSE Framework to Identify Regulatory Gaps for Electrified Transport Aircraft

A typical aircraft certification process consists of obtaining a type, production, airworthiness, and continued airworthiness certificates. During this process, a type certification plan is created that includes the intended regulatory operating environment, the proposed certification basis, means of compliance, and a list of documentation to show compliance. Earlier work by the authors demonstrated a model-based framework for the management of these certification artifacts for normal category airplanes. Presently, it is expanded and adapted to consider certification for transport category airplanes regulated under 14 CFR Part 25, providing clear transparency and traceability between the text of the regulations and imposed requirements, contextual information, and specified test activities. In particular, a capability to identify potential gaps in the applicability of regulations for novel architectures such as electrified aircraft is proposed. This capability, based on mismatches between the functional intent and the corresponding prescribed physical implementation, is developed. A sample implementation of the proposed capability is presented for a notional electrified powertrain aircraft architecture.

electrified transport aircraft↗

The Development of NASA's Fault Management Handbook

Disciplined approach to Fault Management (FM) has not always been emphasized by projects, contributing to major schedule and cost overruns: (1) Often faults aren't addressed until nominal spacecraft design is fairly stable. (2) Design relegated to after-the-fact patchwork, Band-Aid approach. Progress is being made on a number of fronts outside of Handbook effort: (1) Processes, Practices and Tools being developed at some Centers and Institutions (2) Management recognition. Constellation FM roles, Discovery/New Frontiers mission reviews (3) Potential Technology solutions. New approaches could avoid many current pitfalls (3a) New FM architectures, including model-based approach integrated with NASA's MBSE (Model-Based System Engineering) efforts (3b) NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist: FM identified in seven of NASA's 14 Space Technology Roadmaps. Opportunity to coalesce and establish thrust area to progressively develop new FM techniques. FM Handbook will help ensure that future missions do not encounter same FM-related problems as previous missions. Version 1 of the FM Handbook is a good start: (1) Still need Version 2 Agency-wide FM Handbook to expand Handbook to other areas, especially crewed missions. (2) Still need to reach out to other organizations to develop common understanding and vocabulary. Handbook doesn't/can't address all Workshop recommendations. Still need to identify how to address programmatic and infrastructure issues.

Fault Management↗