Digital Engineering for Cubesats with Semantic Web Technologies

Digital Engineering (DE) and the digital thread, which integrates information across the system lifecycle, offer transformative opportunities for systems engineering. This paper explores the application of DE principles to cubesat design and development, leveraging the Digital Engineering Factory (DEF) developed at the University of Arizona. The DEF integrates data from multiple engineering tools into a cohesive dataset using the Violet tool, which organizes the data as a graph database aligned with the University of Arizona Ontology Stack (UAOS). We extend prior work by applying the DEF to a cubesat design project. In particular, we develop a Python-based analysis to simulate orbital decay and calculate the time required for the cubesat to deorbit. This analysis uses inputs from multiple sources and is integrated into the workflow to demonstrate how the DEF supports automated traceability and checking of consistency, correctness, and completeness. This paper details the DEF’s architecture, the cubesat application, and key findings, providing a pathway for advancing DE practices in cubesat design and development. Limitations and future research directions are discussed to guide further development of semantic web technologies in DE.