The document discusses the challenges in systems engineering, particularly focusing on the concept of the digital thread and how disconnected silos hinder effective model-based systems engineering (MBSE). It introduces the Incquery Suite, a set of tools designed to enhance traceability, validate model quality, and integrate engineering processes across various platforms, thereby addressing issues of completeness, correctness, and consistency. The document also highlights its application at organizations like NASA JPL to improve collaboration and efficiency in complex engineering projects.

1. 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

2. The IncQuery Group is an international team of engineering experts with a strong
research and development background. We support systems engineers in several
industries to create tailormade solutions. Automotive professionals, aircraft
engineers, space engineers all trust us to make their systems work exceptionally,
safer, faster, and more reliable.
Who We Are

3. Global Partner Network
Demonstrated history of successful collaboration
with leading international organizations

4. Services
Special software solutions for systems engineers.
Our unique approach to engineering services is focused on your goals – be it
consultancy for challenging R&D projects, customizing, tailoring, or integrating
your toolchains so you can work better, or developing custom software from
scratch, according to your specifications.
Whether you need consultants, developers, analysts, researchers, solution teams
or team leads, we work in many flexible ways to find the best setup for your
business.
Let us help your team achieve more
Consultancy Customization
Integration Development

5. 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

6. Digital Threads - The impact of disconnected silos
Systems Engineering 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!
9

7. Example: requirements to system design
Requirements to System Design
V-Model

8. Example toolchain
• Overall documentation
• Review reports
• Requirements
• Tasks
• Systems design in SysML
• Collaboration on SysML models
• Published SysML models

9. The 3C Challenge:
Building High Quality Model of Models
• Scenario:
–How to maintain the digital thread across JIRA and SysML?
–The “3C Challenge”: correctness, completeness, consistency
• Do I have all requirements mapped into SysML?
• Are all requirements mapped to proper SysML elements?
• Is the rest of the SysML model properly traced to these requirements?
• Our take: no need for external tools for creating links
–Use the tool of your choice to create engineering data
–Use the tool of your choice to create links
• As references in JIRA
• Or as property values in MagicDraw

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

11. Our take
Light-weight approaches to
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

12. • Efficiently extract your engineering data from
proprietary silos
IncQuery Suite
Change the way you do MBSE!
• Set up detailed validation reports and analysis
dashboards, and automated workflows by web-based
interfaces that integrate seamlessly with modern tools
• Create a unified, searchable, and analyzable
representation of your complete digital thread

13. • 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

14. The IncQuery Suite Connects to:

15. 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.

16. • Core of the IncQuery Suite
• Connects to engineering repositories
• Extracts data and converting it into a
knowledge graph that can be easily
accessed and processed further
Powerful Queries at
Your Fingertips
An enterprise-class application that
enables querying, analyzing and
visualizing data in several ways

17. • Easily access all versions of all the projects
• View structure and contents independently of
the limitations of the original tool
• Open several revisions at once, or review
automatically generated changelogs
• Easy-to-use web application to visualize and browse your
projects
• Browses your engineering data as captured in the knowledge
graph at a fine-grained level
• All your projects are reachable with just a few clicks
• No need for third party software and client installations

18. IncQuery Model Validator provides seamless integration of model quality gates to
your systems engineering process through a predefined set of validation rules as
well as a means of customization for your own validation use-cases. The validator
can be deployed as a standalone application, directly integrated into your favorite
DevOps pipeline like Jenkins, TeamCity, etc.
• SysML for MagicDraw/Cameo/Teamwork Cloud
• 116 validation rules: OMG SysML 1.x Standard constraints + SAIC, UPDM, UAF
• Enterprise Architect
• Simple UML conformance checks to make sure your EA project is error-free
• Advanced conformance checks for any UML profile; in particular, SysML
• AUTOSAR
• AUTOSAR Standard 4.3.1 revision constraints
• Software Component template
• ECU-C description template
• Easy customization and extensibility
• Create your own custom rules
• We can support you in migrating your legacy rules (e.g., OCL, structured
expression, Python) into the Validator
Rulesets

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. Toolchain
• Overall documentation
• Review reports
• Requirements
• Tasks
• Systems design in SysML
• Collaboration on SysML models
• Published SysML models
All connected
• Digital thread analytics

23. Information flow added on
external connection, but not on
internal

25. • Use cases to be elaborated in SysML
• Progress and assignee is tracked in Jira
Transitioning from work breakdown to system modeling
Completeness:
Jira tasks in group are all mapped to SysML

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

29. A well-known and pioneering engineering research
organization, NASA JPL's main profile is designing and
manufacturing robotic spacecraft to explore the Solar System.
IncQuery Labs is proud to help them on their engineering
journey to dare mighty things.
Computer Aided Engineering
The Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) division of NASA JPL is one
of the leading groups of experts with the vision to connect systems
engineers with other domain experts to develop missions and
systems using an open portfolio of tools in a shared environment.
The mission is to increase efficiency by
promoting seamless tool integration,
decreasing redundancy and providing
consistent information-paths along
the complete digital thread.
The CAE Systems Environment
Closed
ecosystems Challenging
to reuse
assets or
migrate
between
vendors

30. • Uses IncQuery Server for data integration & as a quality analysis platform
• Connected to MMS, OpenMBEE’s repository
• Authored a wide range of engineering data (E.g., SysML models) in Cameo
• Requirements captured in DOORS, or other documents published in the
View Editor
• Jupyter notebooks and others can be efficiently processed,
validated and queried using a scalable graph or full-text queries
• From 2019, JPL has used the IncQuery Suite in several ways, including:
• The automated validation of SysML models, graph-like visualization of
engineering data in combination with third-party libraries
• Requirements analysis using OSLC and SPARQL
• All taking advantage of the IncQuery Suite’s integration capabilities with the
Jupyter ecosystem
• JPL CAE uses OpenMBEE for their tool integration challenge
• It enables engineers to work in the language of their choice and
easily share and document their work across other tools
Fostered collaboration and interoperability with full
OpenMBEE support by IncQuery Suite

31. Takeaways
• Disconnected / loosely connected silos are a significant
problem today - breaking the MBSE Value Chain
• We proposed a conceptual framework to fix this problem
– Light-weight traceability approach
– Digital Thread Analytics to tackle the 3C Challenge
• Applicable to other tools / scenarios as well!
• https://incquery.io

32. IncQuery Suite at MBSE CES 2022
• Ex No Magic World Symposium
• One of the best SE tech conferences in the US
• IQL sponsor since 2017
– Cameo Excellence Award 2019
• 2022 edition
– Over 450 in-person attendees, 9 booths
– Many good sessions
– Tutorials, workshops, presentations …
– Systems Engineering, Digital Thread, ….
• Join us at the European edition in October!
https://mbsecyberexperience.3ds.com/

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