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NASA SBIR Award Supports Collaborative Systems Engineering

Technical Area

Digital Engineering

This post originally appeared on the Adventium Labs website. Adventium was acquired by Galois in 2022.

Adventium Labs recently won a Phase I NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program to tackle the formidable problem of aggregating data and synchronizing models across multiple diverse organizations. Led by Steve Vestal, INDIGO (INsight to Diverse Information using Graphs and Ontologies) will support integration among tools and exchange of information between multidisciplinary artifacts using automated reasoning and open interface standards.

NASA is dependent on the expertise and collaboration of several thousand vendors to accomplish the Artemis program’s ambitious goal of returning people to the Moon.  To ensure everyone is working from the same playbook, large-scale projects like this utilize Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and rely on a practice called Single Source of Truth (SSoT) that supports collaboration across these vendors.

Complexities and challenges arise because SSoT information is distributed across multiple physical locations, repositories, and organizations. For example, a stakeholder from one vendor may need to view information in the SSoT from a different engineering domain than their own, represented in a modeling language with which they are not familiar, and stored in a repository owned by a different organization.

INDIGO will help system engineers improve capability by reducing technical risk and schedule overruns as they develop embedded software for cyber-physical systems. It will allow stakeholders representing varying program roles and engineering disciplines to easily find and visualize information represented in different modeling languages and formats, manipulated with different tools and environments, stored in multiple repositories, and distributed across multiple organizations.

Upon successful completion of Phase II, INDIGO will be released as an additional capability for subscribers of Adventium Labs’ CAMET® Library of MBSE tools. Learn more about CAMET at camet-library.com.