A Model-Based Design Tool for Systems-Level Spacecraft Design

It is standard practice to mathematically model and analyze the various subsystems that make up a spacecraft, to ensure that they will function correctly when built. However, the system-level behavior of the spacecraft is generally understood in much less rigorous terms. This leaves the spacecraft system far more vulnerable than the subsystems to unforeseen design errors which may not manifest themselves until the integration and test phase, when design changes are most expensive in terms of cost and schedule. In this paper, we present Spacecraft Design Workbench, an extensible graphical design tool built upon the Generic Modeling Environment (GME) tool infrastructure, and intended to allow spacecraft systems engineers to model and analyze proposed spacecraft system designs in a rigorous manner. The graphical models defined by our tool have an underlying formal behavior semantics rooted in the Communicating Sequential Processes process algebra, which permits these models to be analyzed using off-the-shelf tools. As a proof-of-concept, we provide a small example that illustrates the application of our tool to the specification of a simple scientific spacecraft.