Digital Thread Enhancements on the NASA Gateway Program: ACCESS
Cody Wheeler, Josh Sung · 2025
At the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) efforts are performed widely across the agency and the Artemis campaign. Notably, on the Gateway Program, systems engineers work in IBM's DOORS Next Generation (DNG) environment for requirement development and management and in Dassault's MagicDraw (MD) environment for descriptive system modeling and MBSE analyses. Moreover, the Gateway MD system-level models are referenced and used by lower-level Gateway Module projects for further modeling and analysis efforts. Given the importance of an authoritative source of truth, consistent and timely data synchronization between DNG and MD is paramount. As such, the Gateway Digital Architecture (GDA) team on the Gateway Program implemented a digital thread of data from the DNG project to the MD Requirements Model to aid in providing access to a current, valid, and common set of requirements (including verification and other resource data). Whenever the requirements in DNG change, due to document revision or a new document entirely, it is imperative for all parties on the Gateway Program to be working from the same source-of-truth data. To that end, after limited success with multiple digital thread tools, the GDA team created a custom tool to synchronize requirements across the Digital Engineering environment. This tool, named API Code for Connecting Environments via Structured Synchronization (ACCESS), offers the following core features: 1) Mirror the folder structure across tools based on a specified DNG folder structure, 2) create, modify, and move resources in MD based on content in the specified DNG structure, and 3) present any differences in the data to the user, prompting the user to validate, select, and approve updates to the content in the MD model. In addition to core data contents (i.e., requirements and verification data in this case), the tool also can bring in auxiliary contents such as tables, figures, and links with ease from DNG resources. In the initial testing scenarios, the ACCESS tool has demonstrated favorable performance compared to alternate Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) options investigated. The nature of this tool being in-house offers the flexibility to develop and meet the need of any use case that the team requires, including extensibility to multiple, disparate platforms, and there are no recurring license costs. A fundamental need for most any engineer, especially a model-based systems engineer, is data validation and data transformation. This tool has met the need for the NASA GDA team and the team has deployed it to other programs across Artemis for the benefit of the campaign and the Agency.