The Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) division of NASA JPL is one of the leading groups of experts with the vision to connect systems engineers with other domain experts, so that they can develop missions and systems using an open portfolio of tools in a shared environment. The mission is to increase efficiency by promoting seamless tool integration, decreasing redundancy and providing consistent information-paths along the complete digital thread.

NASA JPL has many separately running ecosystems: a multitude of engineering tools are deployed in toolchains, for various aspects of systems design, validation, and documentation management, and many others. But these are often closed ecosystems, so tools from different vendors may not work together seamlessly. Such issues can make it challenging to reuse assets or migrate between vendors, which are all crucial to large scale and cross-domain systems engineering.

JPL CAE uses OpenMBEE address this tool integration challenge. As a software framework, it enables engineers to work in the language of their choice and easily share and document their work across other tools. As a community, it is an open ecosystem of various tools, solutions and vendors, fostering collaboration and interoperability. IncQuery Labs is proud to be participating in this joint effort, and therefore IncQuery Suite comes with full OpenMBEE support.

NASA JPL are one of the first large-scale users of the IncQuery Suite. Starting from 2019, JPL has used the IncQuery Suite in several ways, including the automated validation of SysML models, graph-like visualization of engineering data in combination with third party libraries, requirements analysis using OSLC and SPARQL, all taking advantage of the IncQuery Suite’s integration capabilities with the Jupyter ecosystem.

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The IncQuery Server is a perfect fit into the open architecture of OpenMBEE as a central engineering data integration and quality analysis platform. With its high-performance connector to MMS, OpenMBEE’s repository, a wide range of engineering data such as SysMLmodels authored in Cameo, requirements captured in DOORS, or other documents published in the View Editor, Jupyter notebooks and others can be efficiently processed, validated and queried using scalable graph or full-text queries.

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Our collaboration also extended into systems engineering research, which resulted in a publication at the 23rd ACM/IEEE International Conference of Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS 2020): “Model checking as a service: towards pragmatic formal methods”.  The content of this page is based on publicly accessible information, in particular the white paper titled "The JPL Systems Environment". Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not constitute or imply its endorsement by the United States Government or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology.