Deploying Model-Based Systems Engineering in Thales Alenia Space Italia

In the last decade, Thales Alenia Space started studying the transition of its own systems engineering methods from standard requirement and document based ones to innovative approaches taking care of concurrent engineering, enhanced collaboration, model based system engineering methods and tools and tool-chains for overall engineering environments. In the field of system architectures analysis and definition, TAS has deployed internally a tooled-up approach, which is being extended to other system and multidisciplinary engineering activities. Despite an investment needed to set-up the tooled-up approach, it allows to relate in a same model customer needs and architecture constraints, furthermore ensuring overall document consistency with the design by means of automatic documentation generation from the model, simplifying alignment in case of model update. Moreover, traceability links between requirements and model facilitate impact analysis for system evolution and maintenance, and will allow modifying the architecture baseline, taking care of previous justifications. This paper presents an outline of the TAS Model-based engineering method (ARCADIA), of the use of the related tooling, and some examples derived from the application to space projects in the Domain Observation and Navigation Italy and in the Domain Exploration and Science Italy. Observed benefits of this approach, additional needs which have been managed (such as the extension of the approach to cover the geometry of the physical components) are presented in the conclusions.