Spacecraft Test and Evaluation using Semantic Web Technologies

One area of digital engineering that has received significant attention in recent years is the digital thread. In particular, seamless traceability from requirements through models to simulation results is becoming an increasingly important aspect of this digitalization effort. In this paper, we present an approach to requirements verification that leverages semantic web technologies to support technical and data interoperability with regards to requirements, system architecture, and analysis. The Orbital Verification Ontology Stack (OVOS) is a set of ontologies within the overall University of Arizona Ontology Stack (UAOS) that have been selected to support orbital analysis and requirement verification. The OVOS is written in the Ontological Modeling Language (OML) and is built on the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and the Common Core Ontologies (CCO). The Violet tool is used to aggregate data from multiple engineering tools and is able to generate an OML graph representation of entire dataset. This dataset can then be validated against the OVOS and can be reasoned upon and queried by the user. This approach has been applied to a notional LEO spacecraft design project. System-level requirements, the physical architecture of the spacecraft, and an orbital analysis have been captured in different engineering tools. We use Violet to aggregate this data and generate an OML graph presentation of the dataset. We show that semantic web technologies, such as reasoning, validation and querying, have the potential to add value and efficiency to the verification process.