System design visualizations for synthesizing intent specifications

Today's aerospace industry is faced not only with the challenges of developing spacecraft and supporting technologies to explore the unknown, but they must do so successfully with tighter budgets and fewer personnel. Mission failure causes publicity that the industry cannot afford in this economy. To maintain project schedules and prevent budget overruns, problems in the spacecraft system design must be found early in the development stages. An approach to using existing system design visualizations to aid system verification and validation in the early design stages is described. These commonly used system design visualizations are used to create and intent specification in a systems engineering development environment known as SpecTRM. The intent specification is executable and analyzable, allowing system design flaws and requirements problems to be determined prior to any hardware or coding development. An example of the utilization of these system design visualizations to create an intent specification is applied to the mobility and positioning system (MAPS) of a robot designed to process thermal tiles on the space shuttle.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Chiesi Stephanie Sharo, 1977-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Nancy G. Leveson.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/16654

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/16654