The Digital Engineering Hub: A Live Multi-Vendor Research and Demonstration Lab
Discern
Understand what is possible today with our current technology and partner ecosystem.
Develop
Continue evolving the technology integrations in pursuit of a true blueprint for multi-vendor digital engineering.
Demonstrate
Showcase what we know and what we are learning in conjunction with our partners to prospects, customers, and industry as a whole.
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Meeting Stakeholder Needs Across Customer, Design, And Manufacturing
The System Of Interest
The system of interest is a commercial drone built for aerial photography and video capture. The company responsible for designing the drone is Super Drone Design, while manufacturing is outsourced to Mega Manufacturing. Super Drone Design has implemented MBSE as a methodology for product development and has an drone product family architecture that includes requirements, system context definition, use cases, functional definition, physical architecture decomposition, and behavioral simulation. The model also contains constraints and parameters necessary to perform trade studies.
Drone Internal Block Diagram showing components, links, and signals
Project Scenario: Change Request
There is a request from a major customer, Live Event DroneWorks (LEDW), to increase the minimum operating time from 25.0 min (the minimum requirement) to 30 minutes.
LEDW has informed us that the median duration of one of their events, which include live concerts, sporting events, and auto racing, is 160 minutes. At an operating time of 25 minutes, that requires they have 7 operational drones plus 2 spare drones on hand for each drone team, for a total of 9 drones, as these events are not long enough to recharge the batteries of the first drones that go out of service and put them back into operation.
Increasing the operational life to 30 minutes drops the number of needed operational sequential drones to 6 with the additional two spare drones per team. Some events require up to 15 drone teams, with each team responsible for a specific vantage point.
Reducing the number of needed drones by 1 drone per team will have significant operational cost reductions for LEDW over their yearly event calendar, which includes over 400 events.
They have stated that they will pay a one time fee of $200,000 for this increase in operational duration, as they expect a one time savings of at least +$400K across 5 concurrently operating event crews.
Spider diagram depicting the impacts of the change request
A Seamless Environment for Scalable, Secure, and Collaborative Digital Engineering
Self-Contained In A Cloud Hosted Architecture
Developed and hosted on Amazon AWS, the Digital Engineering Hub enables seamless connection of applications and users across multiple third-party platforms. Leveraging AWS’s global infrastructure, the hub ensures reliable access to resources from anywhere in the world, providing optimal performance and uptime.
Designed To Mimic a Typical Corporate IT Infrastructure
- Domain / Active Directory (AD): User authentication, permissions, and access control.
- Group Policy: Managing and configuring operating systems, applications, and user settings centrally across all computers within the domain.
- Security: Includes firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and antivirus.
- Networking: Routing communication between resources.
- Servers: Server resources to host applications and provide centralized services.
- Workstations/Clients: Virtual workspaces that teams can use to connect to network resources and applications.