Currently supporting the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) Vehicle Integration Office’s (VIO) Requirements and Interface Management group at Glenn Research Center (GRC) working on requirements management and system integration for the NASA Constellation Program to send humans back to the moon then on to Mars. Projects worked in the past include the Fluids and Combustion Facility at GRC, which is an experiment rack going to the International Space Station later this year, and requirements management at Boeing for the 747-8 airplane.
The Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA) at NASA in recent years has started an effort to define Model Based Mission Assurance (MBMA) in an effort to integrate with systems engineers using Model Based Systems Engineer (MBSE) on projects around the agency. A workshop has been held the past couple of years to bring the NASA Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) community together to work on the issues and challenges of this MBMA effort. This year’s workshop focused on developing use cases in four SMA disciplines. Developing use cases helps us define our processes, products, and to give a foundation on which to build mission assurance modeling ontology. Using a template from Alistair Cockburn’s “Writing Effective Use Cases” the groups were able to develop a few summary level use cases in the four disciplines of Quality Assurance, System Safety, Reliability and Maintainability, and Software Assurance. Here we will present some of the use cases and how they can interact with MBSE efforts.
Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) has gained more traction over the years and is being implemented more on projects including at NASA. Seeing this trend, the Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) community at NASA feels the need to develop practices and standards for its own modeling efforts and to integrate with the systems engineering community. Since there is a significant overlap between the systems engineering and SMA domains, developing SMA modeling elements using SysML seemed the most effective way of doing this. Building on the work done at this year’s MBMA workshop at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in developing SMA use cases, we will show some examples of quality assurance modeling possibilities.
