Toward a Framework for Modeling Space Systems Architectures
Peter Shames, Joseph Skipper · SpaceOps 2006 Conference · 2006
There recently have been a number significant effort to develop powerful and extensible approaches for describing a general class of software intensive system architectures. These approaches are typically focused upon architectures of terrestrial systems and they range from generally applicable, but formalized, approaches like the System Engineering Modeling Language (SysML), to more focused approaches such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML) for RM-ODP (Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing). In alignment with the recommendations made in the IEEE 1471-2000 Recommended Practice for Architectural Description of Software-Intensive Systems, both of these approaches intend to support an appropriate set of viewpoints for developing system architectural descriptions. All of these standard architectural approaches are intended to describe large-scale terrestrial data systems that are inherently complex, but are typically fixed in one place and often designed and built by a single organization. In the world of space systems there is an even higher level of complexity in that these are most often multi-organizational creations that are best characterized as systems of systems. In further contrast to terrestrial systems the most challenging elements of