Meaning of Concurrent Space Engineering in Phase B

Kurzfassung

Nowadays, Concurrent Engineering (CE) is a well-established process for pre-development phases within the space sector and applied in international agencies, in industry and academia since several years. Recently the high efficiency of a Phase 0/A CE-process could be verified in many studies at the Concurrent Engineering Facility (CEF) of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The decrease of cost, time and inconsistencies in system design is apparent. This is a result amongst others out of the participation of all domains related to the space mission, the use of a common data model and very frequent iterations in the development process. The DLR Institute of Space Systems has already gained first experiences of Phase B Concurrent Engineering in the frame of the DLR Compact-Satellite project as well as within two CE studies related to CubeSats. These activities have been executed primarily on an empirical basis. It has been done by addressing the needs of the respective project status and simultaneously working out the desired results with all relevant team members in the DLR CEF. In order to elaborate a meaningful approach for supporting higher space project development phases applying CE, an intensive discussion of the stakeholder’s needs, expected results and possible design processes is required. The actual questions deal with aspects of preliminary and detailed design, with the major differences between Phase A and Phase B activities in view of CE, with tools commonly used by the domain experts and how these could be linked to the CE-process and a central data model. Are generic processes required or rather different, dedicated types of CE activities along the Phase B timeline? Are they similar or not for system design, subsystem issues or associated topics such as verification and validation planning, cost estimation or requirement reviews? Do these activities and their objectives have to be pre-defined and shall they be implemented entirely in the project plan already at a very early stage? Is it advisable to keep margin with respect to the schedule for trouble-shooting tasks like a potential payload/bus interface re-design study? In the frame of corresponding work a discussion baseline for the long list of aspects related to CE in higher project phases is provided, by mainly introducing the basic characteristics, requirements and constraints of Phase B design and the comparability to earlier and also higher phases. Furthermore, a set of pros and cons are described for scenarios of how, when and where CE could be applied in Phase B. Finally, initial proposals are given for potential adaptions of organizational and process-related aspects such as the definition of a CE activity timeline, including the variation of design iteration cycles, the team set-up for dedicated sessions and how the H/W and S/W infrastructure could be prepared. Achieving a common understanding of these issues is an important step for more sustainable and efficient space product development applying the methodologies of CE also in Phase B and beyond.