DCEP: A Research Platform for Digital Concurrent Engineering in Space System Development

Kurzfassung

Development in aerospace engineering involves multiple disciplines and collaborators working concurrently on coupled system components. Coordination of design activities and maintenance of a coherent system description is a significant challenge due to mission complexity, distributed development teams, and evolving digital engineering workflows. To address these requirements, the Institute of Structures and Design of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) is developing the Digital Concurrent Engineering Platform (DCEP) within the IRAS (Integrated Digital Research Platform for Affordable Satellites) project. The DCEP is conceived as a web-based, research-oriented prototype environment supporting model-based systems engineering through a parametric representation of the system design tree. Its distributed and modular architecture enables collaborative system modelling, the integration of external tools into a shared engineering process, and incremental expansion of functionality. The current implementation targets early design phases and includes interfaces for external tool coupling, structured system resource budgeting, access control and traceability mechanisms. This paper presents the underlying system model, interfaces for external access and tool integration, and the overall platform architecture in its current implementation