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Bonanne, Kevin

Publications and source records attributed to Bonanne, Kevin.

A Principled Approach to the Specification of System Architectures for Space Missions

Modern space systems are increasing in complexity and scale at an unprecedented pace. Consequently, innovative methods, processes, and tools are needed to cope with the increasing complexity of architecting these systems. A key systems challenge in practice is the ability to scale processes, methods, and tools used to architect complex space systems. Traditionally, the process for specifying space system architectures has largely relied on capturing the system architecture in informal descriptions that are often embedded within loosely coupled design documents and domain expertise. Such informal descriptions often lead to misunderstandings between design teams, ambiguous specifications, difficulty in maintaining consistency as the architecture evolves throughout the system development life cycle, and costly design iterations. Therefore, traditional methods are becoming increasingly inefficient to cope with ever-increasing system complexity. We apply the principles of component-based design and platform-based design to the development of the system architecture for a practical space system to demonstrate feasibility of our approach using SysML. Our results show that we are able to apply a systematic design method to manage system complexity, thus enabling effective data management, semantic coherence and traceability across different levels of abstraction in the design chain. Just as important, our approach enables interoperability among heterogeneous tools in a concurrent engineering model based design environment.

platform-based design

Modeling Complex Cross-Systems Software Interfaces Using SysML

The complex flight and ground systems for NASA human space exploration are designed, built, operated and managed as separate programs and projects. However, each system relies on one or more of the other systems in order to accomplish specific mission objectives, creating a complex, tightly coupled architecture. Thus, there is a fundamental need to understand how each system interacts with the other. To determine if a model-based system engineering approach could be utilized to assist with understanding the complex system interactions, the NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) sponsored a task to develop an approach for performing cross-system behavior modeling. This paper presents the results of applying Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) principles using the System Modeling Language (SysML) to define cross-system behaviors and how they map to crosssystem software interfaces documented in system-level Interface Control Documents (ICDs).

Earth orbit