System design visualizations for synthesizing intent specifications

Abstract

Today's aerospace industry is faced not only with the challenges of developing spacecraft and supporting technologies to explore the unknown, but they must do so successfully with tighter budgets and fewer personnel. Mission failure causes publicity that the industry cannot afford in this economy. To maintain project schedules and prevent budget overruns, problems in the spacecraft system design must be found early in the development stages. An approach to using existing system design visualizations to aid system verification and validation in the early design stages is described. These commonly used system design visualizations are used to create and intent specification in a systems engineering development environment known as SpecTRM. The intent specification is executable and analyzable, allowing system design flaws and requirements problems to be determined prior to any hardware or coding development. An example of the utilization of these system design visualizations to create an intent specification is applied to the mobility and positioning system (MAPS) of a robot designed to process thermal tiles on the space shuttle.