THE DIGITAL ENGINEERING FACTORY: CONSIDERATIONS, CURRENT STATUS, AND LESSONS LEARNED

Abstract

In industry, the advancement of digital engineering and the digital thread aims to reduce the impact of knowledge ‘siloes’ by providing a way to integrate data across the entire system lifecycle and across multiple domains. In a typical engineering curriculum, however, courses are still treated as ‘siloes’, and students often do not have the opportunity to experience this industrially relevant approach to engineering. The Digital Engineering Factory (DEF) is a digital engineering environment under development at the University of Arizona to support engineering students. The DEF supports students by providing access to multiple engineering tools and is structured using a ‘hub-and-spoke’ approach to consolidate data from these tools. Through this connected architecture, students can transfer data generated in a particular course to tools for use in other courses. Connecting course activities in this way enables students to experience a complete end-to-end system lifecycle. At its ‘hub’, the DEF uses Violet to integrate data from multiple sources, create a digital thread, and generate a graph representation of the dataset. This knowledge graph, written in the Ontological Modeling Language (OML), can be viewed in OML Rosetta and is structured according to the University of Arizona Ontology Stack (UAOS). The use of the UAOS and OML Rosetta allows instructors to leverage semantic web technologies to support teaching activities such as grading. In this paper, the authors review the objectives of the DEF, discuss the status of the project, and highlight current limitations and lessons learned with regards to its deployment. These may be useful to inform similar developments in industrial settings.