Implementing a Student Rover Design Exercise in the Digital Engineering Factory

One area of digital engineering that has received significant attention in recent years is the digital thread. The digital thread refers to the integration of digital information across the entire lifecycle of a system. This necessarily means that different engineering tools, each supporting some aspect of the system lifecycle, must be integrated in some way as to enable the seamless transfer and utilization of data. Today's industry leaders consider digital thread initiatives to be a top priority. Engineering education has the potential to benefit significantly from the deployment of a digital thread. Integrating data across multiple engineering courses would enable students to see a complete end-to-end engineering process, observe the consequences of their decisions downstream, gain experience working collaboratively in a digital environment, and evaluate each other's work more effectively. Students no longer submit homework, but commit models to a repository. In this paper, the authors detail the application of the Digital Engineering Factory (DEF) to an example student project. The DEF is a browser-based collaborative engineering environment under development by the authors to support systems and software engineering students at the University of Arizona. The DEF enables the integration of data from tools spanning multiple engineering domains, covering project management, information artifacts, reporting, enterprise architecture, system and software architecture, acquisition, requirements, analysis, verification, and manufacturing. The DEF is also capable of generating a Resource Description Framework (RDF) representation of a dataset to enable the application of semantic web technologies such as reasoning, validation, and querying. A Mars Rover student design exercise that spans multiple engineering courses is defined. Rover requirements have been captured in Jama Connect. The Rover architecture has been modeled using Duro. Student responsibilities have been captured in Jira. The entire project dataset is captured in the DEF, and a representative RDF knowledge graph is generated. This knowledge graph enables students to validate their work and enables querying to support grading by instructors.