Abstract
Ontologies reduce ambiguity in engineering communication and relational database process execution, but use cases for established ontologies have been limited to concept mapping and complex system data visualization. The concinnity of ontologies concerning Project Management (PM), Systems Engineering (SE), and discipline engineering represents a promising vector for ontological research, yet limited use cases have been defined within the ontological research community concerning the synthesis of these domains. No ontologically supported tools exist that could, for example, recognize through semantic relations that a requirement verified by analysis motivates the existence of work products such as an analysis plan to organize parameters, assumptions and methodology, a computational model to calculate or simulate the results, and an analysis report to communicate implications of analysis conclusions. Work products could subsequently be allocated to organizational teams within a model-based platform, again through semantic predicate relations, and thus the allocation of verification methods, a SE process, would be synthesized with the delegation of work products to organizational teams, a PM process. The Engineering Management Platform for Integration, Realization, and Execution (EMPIRE) is an in-development platform for performing project-bespoke Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and Model-Based Project Management (MBPM) to realize this future of ontological utility. The primary mechanism for users to define, edit, and interact with systems and system elements within EMPIRE is through diagrams, much like SysML, but unlike SysML the diagrammatic relations are supported by a set of formal ontologies, the Unified Ontologies Suite (UOS). The UOS is an in-development ontology suite authored first in Prolog and subsequently in the Ontological Modeling Language (OML) and the Web Ontology Language 2 (OWL 2); the UOS is differentiated from existing ontologies through its use of logic programming to facilitate software interface development. Prolog, a logic programming language, is founded in First-Order Logic (FOL) and enables a greater level of formal concept definition ability compared to OWL 2. The EMPIRE Ontology System (EOS) supports EMPIRE core functionality as a software module providing an interface from EMPIRE to the UOS. By connecting EMPIRE and the UOS via the EOS and defining PM and SE concepts ontologically using FOL, logical consistency of PM and SE concept representation is ensured and artificial intelligence-based system characterization is empowered. EMPIRE represents a proof of concept for advanced ontological utility beyond that of concept mapping and data visualization and will be made available to the Jet Propulsion Lab’s F’ working group for alpha testing in May 2024.
Speaker
Michael Halvorson
received a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Auburn University in 2017. He then received a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Auburn University in 2020 and is now a doctoral student in Aerospace Systems Engineering at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Michael was a NASA Research Fellow from 2018-2022 and has been Chief Engineer and acting Lead Systems Engineer for the Alabama CubeSat Initiative since January 2021. Michael develops new methods for Model-Based Systems Engineering of complex systems including ontologies for architecture, design, integration, reliability, requirements, and verification. He leads the strategic direction of the Unified Ontologies Foundry, the organization developing the ontological basis underpinning the Engineering Management Platform for Integration, Realization, and Execution (EMPIRE).
