Enhancing Ontological Metamodel Creation Through Knowledge Extraction from Multidisciplinary Design and Optimization Frameworks

The design of complex aerospace systems requires a broad multidisciplinary knowledge base and an iterative approach to accommodate changes effectively. Engineering knowledge is commonly represented through engineering analyses and descriptive models with underlying semantics. While guidelines from systems engineering methodologies exist to guide the development of system models, creating a system model from scratch with every new application/system requires research into more adaptable and reusable modeling frameworks. In this context, this research demonstrates how a physics-based multidisciplinary analysis and optimization tool, SUAVE, can be leveraged to develop a system model. By leveraging the existing physics-based knowledge captured within SUAVE, the process benefits from the expertise embedded in the tool. To facilitate the systematic creation of the system model, an ontological metamodel is created in SysML. This metamodel is designed to capture the inner workings of the SUAVE tool, representing its concepts, relationships, and behaviors. By using this ontological metamodel as a modeling template, the process of creating the system model becomes more structured and organized. Overall, this research aims to streamline the process of building system models from scratch by leveraging existing knowledge and utilizing an ontological metamodel as a modeling template. This approach enhances formal knowledge representation and its consistency, and promotes reusability in multidisciplinary design problems.