NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- robert karban
Europa Clipper
NASA's Europa Clipper will conduct detailed reconnaissance of Jupiter's moon, Europa, and investigate
whether the icy moon could harbor conditions suitable for life. Europa Clipper has been the largest JPL
project to utilize the JPL Systems Environment and OpenMBEE’s linked-data mechanism. Up to
the Critical Design Review, the system model consisted of over 2.5 million elements and over 230 linked-
data View Editor documents that were collaboratively produced by approximately 100 concurrent users
and resulted in 445,000 connections between documents and model elements. Among those documents
were Conceptual Descriptions, Requirements Documents, Block Diagrams and resource tables for mass,
power, and data,
Mars 2020
The Mars 2020 rover, recently announced to be named “Perseverance”, will investigate a region of Mars
where the ancient environment may have been favorable for microbial life, probing the Martian rocks for
evidence of past life. Throughout its investigation, the rover will collect samples of soil and rock, and
cache them on the surface for potential return to Earth by a future mission.
The JPL Systems Environment has been used extensively throughout the whole lifecycle of the mission
which will launch in 2020.
Two capabilities are demonstrated here:
Align Ground System & Operations Capability
Generate integrated cross-domain documentation
The Mission Operations System (MOS) operational scenarios were captured using BPMN models (top
diagram in Figure 19). The Ground Data System (GDS) implemented software capabilities tracked in
JIRA tickets. The MOS team tested each identified scenario in order to verify team roles and tasks as well
as to test the GDS software. The JPL Systems Environment was used to trace and analyze the
relationships between the identified scenarios and the implemented software capabilities. Once these
relationships were captured, derivations were defined to identify which scenarios (the color differentiation
of BPMN in top diagram of Figure 19) were supported by which GDS capabilities, thus creating a
coverage matrix. DocGen was used to query the BPMN model and the reference model and generate a
technical report (bottom diagram of Figure 19) .Using the OpenMBEE linked-data approach, the
engineering work remained in sync with the calculated coverage and the produced documents. All three
components contributed to a specified Integrated System Model
Similarly, another type of Integrated System Model was designed for cross-domain documentation. In this
case, the electrical functions and reference designators were modeled in a standardized language, SysML,
linked, and the produced document which consisted of many tables (examples seen in Figure 20) was
generated through the mentioned OpenMBEE linked-data approach.
Over 90 linked-data View Editor documents that were collaboratively produced by approximately 50
concurrent users and resulted in 180,000 connections between documents and model elements.
OpsRev
JPL’s Operations Revitalization (OpsRev) project was one of the first projects to use OpenMBEE and an
early version of the JPL Systems Environment. The project demonstrates how the use of DocGen
managed documents significantly reduces the effort to produce consistent engineering documents. For the
first review, the initial DocGen tooling was created by a systems engineer with less than 0.25 full time
equivalent (FTE) allocation. The team then generated full documentation and review products, and turned
around changes in less than 24 hours from the day of the review. The team developed ten substantial
documents within a month with 3-4 FTEs. Tasks included systems engineering activities with
approximately one FTE allocated to developing frameworks, tooling, and patterns. The managed linked-
data document approach saved about five work-months of effort in one calendar month.
References: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Yg4_ye3A07TQ82iwGWnWtD0GjvfNaTMg/view?usp=drive_link
https://ses.gsfc.nasa.gov/ses_data_2021/210728_Bayer.pdf