Leveraging an Integrated Data Platform to Support Satellite Tradespace Analysis

When developing hardware/software systems destined for a space environment, the low margin for error and high difficulty of meeting the requirements mean that data integrity must be guaranteed throughout the development process. This begins as early as ideation and design, when the designer(s) must navigate a large tradespace of candidate systems to identify the solution forward. Unfortunately, the software tools involved in space system design typically operate in isolation from one another, making this an inefficient and error-prone process. Using a digital engineering environment can address this challenge by integrating engineering data from disparate tools into a single shared database, structuring the data as entities, and enabling the definition of relations between these entities in a common environment. In turn, this would allow users to query this comprehensive dataset and generate reports containing the relevant information (e.g., project requirements, system architecture, hardware and software design, test campaigns, analyses) in a unified dashboard. In this paper, we present a hub-and-spoke architecture with Violet at the center. Violet can integrate data from multiple engineering tools and can generate a graph representation of this dataset in the Ontological Modeling Language (OML). By representing the dataset as a knowledge graph, users can leverage semantic web technologies to reason with, query and infer new information from this data. For this effort, the knowledge graph is structured according to the University of Arizona Ontology Stack (UAOS) to ensure its validity. The UAOS is a modular, multi-layered ontology stack based on the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). These capabilities are particularly powerful when used to evaluate the consistency, completeness and correctness of a dataset. We apply this approach to the notional NoraSat: a low-Earth orbit (LEO) imaging satellite. We demonstrate how this approach can be applied to support tradespace analysis and guide the selection of an appropriate transmitter for a given set of mission requirements. We use Jama for requirements management, SysML v2 for mission and architecture modeling, Sedaro for orbital simulation, SatCatalog for transmitter specifications, and Python for link budget analysis. We demonstrate how these heterogeneous datasets can be integrated in Violet and incorporated in the analysis workflow. Finally, we show how teams can use this environment and the UAOS to run these analysis pipelines and efficiently verify mission requirements as the tradespace and associated datasets evolve.