IncQuery Group's presentation for the MBSE CES event, “The Genesis of Holistic Systems Engineering: Completeness and Consistency Management of the Digital Thread”

2. The Genesis of Holistic Systems Engineering:
Completeness and Consistency Management
of the Digital Thread
Peter Lunk • Istvan Rath
IncQuery Group

3. The Genesis of Holistic
Systems Engineering:
Completeness and
Consistency Management
of the Digital Thread
istvan.rath@incquerylabs.com
István Ráth, CEO
peter.lunk@incquerylabs.com
Péter Lunk, Solutions Manager
Dallas, TX, USA
Vienna, Austria
Budapest, Hungary

4. The promised benefits of MBSE
• Improved communication
• Fewer defects / higher quality
• To improve not just quality of SE, but the overall quality and value of engineering across the
organization
• Systems architecture as the “single source of truth”
• Silos remain disconnected even though the goal of MBSE is to connect silos
• Closed product ecosystems
• Lack of good APIs and interchange formats
The MBSE Value Chain
is broken
No global consistency
Difficult customization
Data lock-in
Vendor lock-in

5. The impact of disconnected silos
SE remains an isolated discipline
– One of many silos next to mechanical, electrical, ALM/PLM, …
As disconnected silos, what is the interface between architecture and
disciplines?
– It is often a document produced from an MBSE tool
– Consequence: data reentry and/or copy-paste
– No guarantee of completeness, correctness and
consistency
A lot of time and money is wasted!
6

6. Example: transition to detailed design
Transition to Detailed Design
V-Model

7. The silo problem of “transition to detailed design”
Video Drone Model Cable/Harness
Systems Engineering Detailed Design
SysML extension for ECAD (Electrical Computer-aided Design)
(modeling-languages.com)

8. The 3C Challenge:
Building High Quality Model of Models
• Completeness
– Make sure all my components and functions exist both in SE
and ECAD
• Correctness
– If component A has is of type “PCB” (in SE)
è it should be mapped to a PCB device (in ECAD)
• Consistency
– If a connection transfers an item between components A and B
(in SE)
è there is a wire carrying the corresponding signal between
devices A and B (in ECAD)

9. What causes 3C problems?
• Input error
• Forgetting/missing something
• Copy/paste error
• Incorrect mappings
• Roundtripping gone bad
• Change

10. Our take
Discipline-specific, automated
bridge tools that create the
digital thread
Overlaid layer of digital
thread analytics that can
expose parts of the digital
thread depending on the
need/use-case
Vendor-neutral federated
toolchain

11. The E3.GENESYS Connector
Video Drone Model Cable/Harness Topology Editor
Systems Engineering Detailed Design
Transfer Logical
Architecture
Diagrams
Requirements
Parameters
Verification Requirements
Expose the Model
Design Envelope

12. Building the Electrical Viewpoint
• Components, signals, and ports
are analyzed
• Signals are of type electrical
• Ports have pin:signal
assignments, part number, or
are of type electrical
• Components are of type ECU,
PCB or are part of an electrical
signal

13. The E3.GENESYS Interface
1
1 Navigate the model repository
2 Connect the model, map elements, and load into E3
2
3
3 View model details to provide context, criteria,
constraints, etc... 4
4 Provide feedback on observed parameters to verify
back to the architecture

14. Video demonstration of the GENESYS.E3 Connector

15. Our take
Discipline-specific, automated
bridge tools that create the
digital thread
Overlaid layer of digital
thread analytics that can
expose parts of the digital
thread depending on the
need/use-case
Vendor-neutral federated
toolchain

16. • Automatically validates
your SysML or other
engineering projects,
using standard rule sets
(e.g., OMG UML, SysML,
UPDM, UAF, or others),
or custom-built rules
• Efficiently extracts your
engineering data from
open/ proprietary tools
and repositories
• Searches, queries, and
analyzes your complete
digital thread
• Empowers the creation
of in-depth, interactive,
visual documents and
dashboards by the
incorporated Jupyter
open-source ecosystem
Validation
Workflows
and Reports
Interactive
Analysis
Dashboard
Engineering
Data
Queries
Tool
Integration
Platform
• Builds continuous
integration/validation
workflows, enabling the
next generation DevOps
for MBSE
• Unique insight into
your digital thread
• Maintains a uniform,
easily accessible,
structured knowledge
graph
• Uses powerful graph
query languages such as
VQL, SPARQL
• Uses ElasticSearch full-
text search
• Provides automated
and customizable
bridge components to
perform information
flow between tools

17. INCQUERY MODEL VIEWER
An easy-to-use web
application to visualize and
browse your projects in
a structured and
collaboration-focused way.
INCQUERY DESKTOP
A powerful add-on to
SysML tools that lets you
execute model queries and
validation rules locally.
INCQUERY SERVER
An enterprise-class,
scalable application that
extracts data from silos
and maintains the
knowledge graph.
INCQUERY INTEGRATOR
DevOps-ready stand-alone
applications to facilitate
automated information
sharing between
engineering tools, with full
traceability.
INCQUERY VALIDATOR
DevOps-ready stand-alone
applications that provide
automated model quality
reports, based on standard
and custom rules.
INCQUERY ANALYZER
A web-based workbench
incorporating the powerful
Jupyter ecosystem to
validate and analyze
your complete
digital thread.

18. The IncQuery Suite Connects to:

19. • Integrated with
• the popular Jupyter ecosystem through
open-source Python libraries and the
OpenAPI interface
• documentation management systems
such as the OpenMBEE View Editor or
Atlassian Confluence
• Easy-to-use analyst workbench to manage automated validation and
analysis reports
• Supports standards such as SysML, UPDM, UAF
• as well as open-source libraries
(SAIC Digital Engineering Validation Tool)
• Custom rules can be defined by queries (e.g. SPARQL, ElasticSearch)
• E.g. GENESYS.E3 naming consistency rule ààà

20. 3C Analysis for the GENESYS.E3 Connector
• Step 1: Initial mapping performed
with GENESYS.E3 Connector
• Result:
– Partially complete (Subsystem
mapping is disabled by default)
“If a connection transfers an item between components A and B (in SE)
è there is a wire carrying the corresponding signal between
devices A and B (in ECAD)”
• Inconsistent signal allocations

21. Step 2: Adding missing wiring and signal allocation

22. 3C Analysis continued
• Step 3: Re-run the validation
• Result: One pair of allocation problems is resolved
2021 WSRC – The Genesis of Holistic
Systems Design | Enrique Krajmalnik and
Istvan Rath
23

23. Progress tracking
• Historical analytics as the “progress bar” of a complex
engineering process
– Model Integrator / Reviewer can follow the “Transition to
Detailed Design” process on a version control dashboard
– Track progress via KPIs as the mapping completeness is
improved
– Identify and fix
correctness issues
quickly

24. Takeaways
• Disconnected / loosely connected silos are a significant
problem today - breaking the MBSE Value Chain
• We proposed a conceptual framework to fix this problem
– Purpose-built light-weight bridges
– Digital Thread Analytics to tackle the 3C Challenge
• Applicable to other tools / scenarios as well!
• https://www.zuken.com/us/product/model-based-wire-
harness-design/
• https://incquery.io

25. T h a n k
Y U
istvan.rath@incquerylabs.com
István Ráth, CEO
peter.lunk@incquerylabs.com
Péter Lunk, Solutions Manager