SBIR-STTR Award

The amount of cross-domain data available to the designer today, and the speed at which it continues to grow is unprecedented. The data often come from heterogeneous sources that were developed independently, without a consensus on the syntax or semantics. The integration of the heterogeneous data is possible because of the access to its respective metadata, or data about data. The availability of vast amounts of cross-domain data led to the development of the Big Data (BD) technologies - a wide range of new standards, processing paradigms, architectures and frameworks, that are being actively applied in virtually all domains. BD tools are capable of discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in vast amounts of data. The analytics utilize algorithms from across different fields, such as distributed machine learning, data mining, pattern mining or computer vision, to name a few. The challenge of comprehending entire DT goes well beyond the scope of the proposed work. VIStology and Raytheon are proposing to focus primarily on the Capabilities-Based Assessment and develop methods and tools that leverage Big Data Analytics (BDA) supported by semantic technologies to extract and link design artifacts from common engineering documents to conduct trade space exploration.

The main goal of this project is to provide the capabilities for enhancing the analytics needed for the realization of the concepts of Digital Thread and Digital Twin. The main technical objective is to develop, prototype, validate and demonstrate the enhancements of data analytic capabilities by leveraging semantic technologies. The approach will be implemented in a full prototype of the system termed Semantic Big Data Analytical Foundation for a Digital Thread (SemThread). The main domain for this project will be Radar Systems. Consequently, the approach will be applied to thenew acquisition programSENSRsponsored by the FAA, DoD and DHS. The SemThread system will include tools for extracting information from unstructured data sources using Big Data Analytics tools, mapping the extracted data to ontologically based semantic representations, translation of outputs of MBSE tools, e.g., SysML, to formal representations, and integrating the information from disparate data sources. SemThread will support capability gap analysis, Analysis of Alternatives, design space exploration and discovery of new capabilities through the process of automatic inference on the formal semantic representation of integrated information. In this effort, VIStology will closely collaborate with Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems (IDS).