Simulation and Process Data Management in the Digital Thread

As digital engineering principles permeate into engineering disciplines spanning the full product lifecycle, simulation (process and) data management (SPDM) solutions must keep pace and facilitate seamless digital thread integration. By focusing on how SPDM must integrate with the digital thread, SAIC developed a novel approach we’ve termed ‘Analysis Containers’. These analysis containers enable SPDM within the digital thread by providing both configuration management over simulation studies and interface definitions to ensure simulation artifacts remain consistent with artifacts from other engineering disciplines. In this paper, we will describe the relevant use cases that steered SAIC into the analysis container solution. We will describe how SAIC decomposed these driving use cases and prototyped a solution that borrows functions and features from docker containers and industry best practices for SPDM and software development. We will present the anatomy of an analysis container, describe the behaviors and interfaces needed to integrate with the digital thread, and illustrate how these containers can be aggregated to provide real-time dashboards for stakeholders across the product lifecycle. Furthermore, we will describe how this functionality enables simulation driven design. We will present this material using engineering artifacts spanning the full engineering product lifecycle (from concept design to operations and maintenance) in the context of a single product exemplar. SAIC developed this ‘mock product’ for the sole purpose of proving out our end-to-end digital engineering capabilities. While designing this product, we developed models, simulations, and analyses to demonstrate full product lifecycle SPDM capability in the digital thread. We will give an overview of these models, simulations, and analyses to highlight the versatility and user friendliness of our analysis container approach.