An ASDL student team recently won the Dr. David M. Aber Scholarship Competition. This competition gives students the opportunity to showcase their work on projects involving the Dassault Systèmes (DS) solutions to leaders within the industry during the COExperience event. The Design Environment for Lunar Operations and System-Architecting (DELOS) Grand Challenge team took first place in the competition, which includes a $3000 prize. Team members include:

Lauren Victoria Paulson presented for the team during the event.

The abstract for this project is:

The interest in the space domain is on a steady rise after years since the last Apollo mission in 1972. Under the Artemis missions, the focus lies on the lunar south pole and the establishment of a permanent lunar base for long-term human presence. The successful completion of the Chandraayan-3 mission in 2023 marked the first landing on the lunar south pole, and the beginning of a new era of research efforts related to how human life could be sustained on the Moon.

The new focus is a multi-level problem leveraging multiple stakeholders with collaborative / competitive interests and objectives. Developing a lunar base with city-level growth potential that exhibits complex interactions between assets and system processes requires the ability to rapidly explore, evaluate, prioritize, and select lunar architecture alternatives. To that end an architecting and sizing approach is proposed that enables the representation, modeling and simulation of a lunar base and its main components.

Starting from the mission definition, a requirements flow-down process towards an executable modeling and simulation platform is adopted, following the R-F-L-P (Requirements-Functional-Logical-Physical) approach for defining the system architecting views. The outcome of this model-based exercise will result in a requirements-driven parametric interactive tradeoff environment, which will allow for exploration, prioritization, and selection of lunar architecture alternatives. The selection process is driven by tradeoff analysis and results which can address questions related to power demand and supply options, In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) strategies, etc., and the broader aspect of technology selection of resource availability vs. mission-level risks.

Through tools provided by Dassault Systemes, a Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) solution was set up using CATIA Magic in order to formulate the RFLP views. Within the MBSE model, requirements are decomposed into functional and logical connected model views and mapped to the physical systems and subsystems. Leveraging surrogate modeling techniques and Functional Mockup Units (FMUs), physics-based models of these systems are modeled within CATIA Magic to provide an executable, parametric representation of the lunar base architecture. To support stakeholders in driving architecture-level decisions, an interactive parametric decision support environment is integrated into the framework. Finally, a demonstration case study is presented to showcase the decision-making capabilities under a given mission to select assets, enable technologies, and allocate key requirements related to safety, power and resource availability, and sustained human presence.

The COExperience event is the premier DS user-focused conference that brings together users and preeminent industry partners and provides transformative education that will help them build skills, increase efficiencies, and gain knowledge. This year was held 13-16 May in Dallas, Texas.

The DSCommunity of Experts (COE) provides a forum for the interchange of knowledge, experiences, and technical information relating to the application of the DS family of solutions and the environment in which they operate; and to communicate with DS regarding the current and future capabilities and use of these products.