Abstract

This presentation discusses our Integrated Knowledge Centric Engineering methodology and accompanying digital engineering platform, which are designed to tackle the challenges of ensuring that the agility and rigour of large-scale aerospace projects are managed effectively. This is becoming increasingly important as these projects continue to increase their demand for efficiency while maintaining reliability, meaning that these projects must maintain a swift execution without sacrificing the robustness that is associated with projects in this industry.

The analysis that we conducted has uncovered various causes for these challenges, with one of the major ones being that teams within these large projects can become increasingly separated from one another, negatively affecting the communication between teams. On top of this, reliance on the use of specific tools for the development process can make switching to newer and more effective tools more challenging, affecting the efficiency of development.

In an attempt to mitigate these issues, we have devised a methodology called Integrated Knowledge Centric Engineering (IKCE), which is an amalgamation of the principles from JPL’s Integrated Model Centric Engineering (IMCE) augmented with tools and techniques from DevOps. To support this new IKCE methodology, we have commenced work on our own digital engineering platform designed to facilitate typical DevOps functions, whilst also providing a foundation for other features intrinsic to IKCE.

Currently, our implementation of the digital engineering platform is designed to provide teams and their developers access to IKCE-enabled workspaces, which act as development environments that in a using RDF. We have also begun the development of some of the tools that will be used within the workspaces. These include the enterprise capability library that provides a centralised platform for sharing data between workspaces, and the smart documentation system to aid in user-centred visualisation of data within a workspace.

To conclude the presentation, we will outline our future plans to develop a set of foundational vocabularies for IKCE, for capturing data from areas such as project management and systems architecture. On top of this, we plan to work on increasing the adoption of the IKCE methodology within the various teams at Leonardo, with a goal of setting a new standard for project management within the aerospace industry.

Speaker

Lewis Humphries

received his BSc in Computer Science from Sheffield Hallam University in 2021 and his MSc in Advanced Computer Science from the University of York in 2023. Currently he is working alongside the University of York and Leonardo UK in the creation of the IKCE methodology and its implementation, aiming at increasing the agility of large scale aerospace projects without sacrificing rigour.