Data Management in a Collaborative Design Architecture, Part A: The Basic Concept of the Underlying Data Management System

Abstract

In today's designs for modern aero engines, large amounts of heterogeneous data are generated, distributed across the various process steps in a collaborative design approach. This data comprises a wide variety of data sizes and results from the many different involved disciplines. It becomes essential to provide a consistent formulation of the data including everything from the preliminary design to the high-fidelity simulations of detailed individual components. Linking all this information in one central data management system (DMS) is the key to design even more efficient future engines by using a holistic approach. This three-part paper presents different aspects of a concept that addresses these requirements in a collaborative design architecture. In this first part, the basic elements of the central DMS required for this holistic approach are presented. The core of the system is a graph database, which enables the generation of a knowledge graph including data and metadata as well as additional information. All files are stored in a separate file storage system and represented by nodes in the graph database containing links to the respective file. The concept also includes services which can be flexibly integrated into the DMS. These services can be used to perform file operations when reading and writing user data, such as reading and extracting metadata from a file.