SBIR-STTR Award

Global Technology Connection, Inc. and its university partners propose a structured, model-based approach to the definition and development of Institutional Management Digital Twins that is guided by architectural and Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) practices and principles. The proposed technical approach identifies a series of steps aimed at guiding engineers through such digital twin development tasks. Such capability would provide multiple benefits including having optimal level and granularity of information and better problem understanding for critical decision making, model and knowledge reuse to reduce digital twin development time frames, improved operations, communication, and collaboration among several stakeholders. In Phase I, we will identify users and use cases, scope and context, data sources and types, modeling needs and its details, and the final product and its views. Access to ongoing Digital Twin proof-of-concept studies and the team’s breadth of experience in modeling languages like SysML and MBSE solutions in the field of Digital Twin Institutional Management to support Health/Automated Decision Making at multiple scales across buildings and campuses will be leveraged in this effort. In phase II, we will expand on the Phase I developed Digital Twin architectures to develop commercial level prototypes and apply them on identified industry/partner’s buildings. Anticipated

Benefits:
NASA’s infrastructure and buildings across multiple campuses vary in age, technological capabilities, and connectivity. The proposed technical approach identifies a series of steps aimed at guiding engineers through digital twin development tasks. This provides benefits including having optimal information for critical decision making, enabling model reuse to reduce development costs, and improved operations. Building management tools result in identifying, prioritizing, and achieving significant cost savings across NASA campuses. The cost savings and operational benefits of Institutional Management Digital Twins is universal. Due to the flexible nature of our technology that utilizes architectural and MBSE practices and principles, digital twins for non-NASA government and private facilities can be easily developed and implemented to minimize inefficiencies and improve operations.

NASA manages $40B in facility assets with an inventory of more than 5,000 facilities. Over 83% of this infrastructure is beyond its design life, and the agency faces a deferred maintenance backlog of $2.77B. An effective method to address this challenge and achieve digital transformation is through Enterprise Architecture (EA) and the use of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) methods. During Phase I, guided by stakeholders from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and headquarters, Global Technology Connection and Georgia Tech’s Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory successfully demonstrated the feasibility and value of using the Unified Architecture Framework (UAF) to create a model of NASA enterprise. This interlinks NASA’s missions, projects, facilities, capabilities, timelines and more using their connected attributes. Doing so enabled rapid, accurate, and more data-driven decision-making to guide and prioritize investments around NASA's aging infrastructure. We identified pertinent use cases and demonstrated how our approach can lead to informed decisions for Institutional Construction of Facilities (I-CoF) projects. The objective of Phase II is to mature and implement the model-based enterprise architecture for institutional management digital twins (EA-MBSE) at GSFC leveraging UAF to enable decision-making with increased insight and velocity for I-CoF projects. Specifically, we will address three use cases which we have identified as the most pressing and the most beneficial for NASA stakeholders. Facilities prioritization for master planning of greenbelt facilities Institutional CoF budget re-allocation and justification Multi-facility energy conservation measure (ECM) projects prioritization For easy extraction and dissemination of these insights, we will generate user specific views with streamlined interactivity. A technology plan addressing technical & operational challenges will also be developed. Anticipated

Benefits:
As NASA moves from center-based to agency-level decision making, it is crucial to have an easily and a scalable solution for viewing connected information across domains. Our solution provides NASA with a tool to Conduct institutional CoF budget re-allocation and justification Perform facilities prioritization analysis for master planners Analyze and prioritize multi-facility energy conservation measure (ECM) projects Our solution enables these tasks to be accomplished cost effectively and without human induced errors. Our solution is also applicable to large government agencies such as DoE, NIH, and DoD agencies to large universities. It provides objective and crucial information rapidly and effectively with reusable views for decision-makers. This enable fully informed investment prioritization decisions cost effectively especially in rapidly changing budget environments and scenarios.