Data Formalisation through MBSE for Concurrent Preliminary Design of CubeSats

The space market trends indicate that in the next decade, the space industry will continue to experience a radical transformation in terms of the number of operating satellites and market value. Simultaneously, Industry and Academia are leading a transition from Document-Based System Engineering to Model-Based System Engineering (MBSE), combined with Concurrent Engineering (CE) approaches, due to increased demand and reduced design time. How to effectively formalise data and improve data exchange is an open question. The representation of complex systems through models for defining their functional, logical, and physical architectures is not as straightforward as it could seem. For instance, during the Preliminary Design (PD) phase, when mathematical analyses and simulations need to be carried out, and system budgets need to be generated, such models require integration with external mathematical models that allow systems to be represented from a design parameters point of view. Parallel to the adoption of the MBSE methodology, another revolution in the space sector, and more specifically in the small satellites field, has been the introduction of the CubeSat standard. Thanks to their standardised form factor, they enable a further reduction in development time and cost, especially in the PD phase, therefore offering an opportunity to increase the accessibility to space on a tight budget and representing a valuable research topic for Academia. This thesis illustrates the work conducted in collaboration with ISAE-SUPAERO (Toulouse, FR), aiming to provide a formalisation of a CubeSat model to include relevant information for its use during the various stages of the PD phase. This research work presents the following main contributions: (i) to formalise the modelling efforts of CubeSats from the PD stage by architecting a generic CubeSat model with Systems Modelling Language (SysML), allowing data storage and visualisation through the use of Unified Modelling Language (UML) stereotypes, and enhancing information exchange for the integration with any set of simulation and analysis tools; (ii) to elaborate an end-to-end use case scenario in the context of the Nanostar Software Suite (NSS), an open-source software framework that aims to facilitate data exchange between various domain-specific software during CE sessions. The latter serves as a proof of concept demonstrating the proposed formalisation’s benefits. The proposed formalisation allows a CubeSat SysML model to be considered as the central source of truth for data during the entire design process, which can facilitate automating trade-off analyses, by relying on the combination of all SysML advantages and a well-chosen data instantiation across all PD study phases.