SBIR-STTR Award

Inability to track design intent, and the flow of parameters across the multiplicity of modeling tools used in engineering, is a significant problem in fleet maintenance, and engineering in general. Beehive will apply its expertise in engineering knowledge management, and proprietary technology for representation and management of engineering measurements and metadata to this problem. Phase I will develop and demonstrate feasibility of metadata models for intent and parameter data flow using the Beehive framework and a companion document store such as SharePoint. User interfaces achieving automatic capture of parametric information will be designed and demonstrated. The Option project will prototype a database implementation of the intended system using one calculation tool to show feasibility of the system''''s interfaces to external tools.

Benefit:
The Analysis Management System (AMS) solicited, implemented on the Beehive framework has, itself, the potential for sale and customization to commercial engineering organizations. Furthermore, the advancement of Beehive''''s core products through this SBIR work will significantly enhance its main lines of business as well. Beehive''''s breakthrough approach to managing engienering numbers will significantly advance the state of the art and will improve the engineering process by offering traceability, verification and validation, and re-use for unstructured information that was considered intractible before.

Keywords:
Analysis Management, Analysis Management, DESIGN INTENT, knowledge management, XML, metadata, Computer Aided Engineering, Knowledge Capture, unstructured data

The Naval Air Command performs a wide variety of sophisticated and time-consuming calculations in the service of repairing fighter jets and other high-end equipment. These calculations are developed by specialists at some expense and time. This SBIR concerns an effort to extract more value from the intellectual capital contained in these calculations, deploy them to a broader spectrum of users, and speed the solution of repair problems requiring modeling. A system is desired that will capture the engineering parameters and results, and make them searchable and reusable to a broader body of Navy personnel. In Phase I of this project, True Engineering analyzed the interfaces and inputs to common Navy modeling tools and the work orders that prompted the models. We then proposed a system involving True Engineerings truenumber format for capturing the critical values in the models, exposing the conditions and restrictions on their use in these models, and making it possible to reuse the models in situations that are deemed to be equivalent. We now propose in Phase II to prototype such a system with a variety of modeling tools, and to institute a study of that system in use at NavAir. We will investigate architectures for deployment that will integrate with a variety of systems and scenarios in place across Navy IT, and perform deployment to a broader audience as an option to the Phase II work.

Benefit:
This project will meet NAVAIR''s need to integrate and capture the work and data flow across disparate modeling tools involved in performing critical calculations for fleet maintenance. It will offer traceability, resuseability and produuctiivity not possible with current technologies. This can solve similar problems throughout goveernment and industry enginerring and maintenance efforts.

Keywords:
traceability, Engineering analysis, Knowledge Capture, model management