Virtual Mission Systems for Multi-Disciplinary Engineering System Design

To ensure the science return while minimizing the cost and risk of a mission, a lifecyclewide concurrent engineering design process must be established. This paper describes the Virtual Mission Operation Framework (VMOF), which provides distributed modeling, simulation, and visualization services. The goal of the VMOF is to enable concurrent design of a mission system and operation of that system by providing operational perspective to the system designers and system perspective to the operation designers. Concurrent development of the both perspectives requires interdisciplinary modeling and simulation of the mission-operation activities and the system architecture. The VMOF focuses on tracking and resolving interdependencies among the engineering processes and the subsystems while maintaining the compatibilities with discipline-centric operation activities and system architecture.