Huntsville Space and Defense Symposium

Session overview
This session examines how mission‑centric digital engineering uses executable, integrated system models as decision artifacts to improve architecture trades, acquisition decisions, and certification readiness across the system lifecycle.

Topics include

• Translate mission objectives into measurable capability and architecture trade criteria using mission models
• Apply increasing model fidelity across RFIs, proposals, and early program activities to reduce early program risk
• Enable protected model sharing and reference architectures to support coordination across stakeholders
• Generate verification, integration, and certification evidence from executable system models

Session overview
This session focuses on demonstrating simulation‑driven insight for operational and sustainment decision‑making by reusing design models as digital twins. We will create a physics‑based model and update it with operational data to create an accurate digital twin of the fielded system. We can use this digital twin to understand the system’s health over time and predict future performance and ability to fulfill system requirements.

Topics include

• Select appropriate modeling approaches—physics‑based, data‑driven, or hybrid—based on data availability, fidelity needs, and the decisions the digital twin is intended to support.
• Tune digital twins using operational data to capture asset‑to‑asset variation and performance degradation, keeping models representative of the physical system over time.
• Use virtual sensing to derive unmeasured states without the investment of real sensors
• Apply simulation‑based failure and what‑if analyses to inform predictive maintenance and sustainment planning

Session overview
Model, simulate, and assess satellite constellations within an integrated mission engineering workflow to connect mission needs to constellation architecture, communications performance, and resilience outcomes.

Topics include

• Model mission threads and constellation architectures within a digital environment
• Analyze access, coverage, and end-to-end communications performance
• Evaluate mission impact resulting from constellation degradation or asset loss
• Maintain traceability from mission objectives to engineering analysis results in an MBSE aligned workflow

Engage with a distinguished panel of aerospace and defense leaders as they share firsthand experiences, challenges, and achievements in implementing Digital Engineering Workflows. Full panelist list coming soon.

Overview Session: DO 178C Evidence from Model-based Design: Traceable, Review Ready Certification Artifacts

This session describes how Model-based Design produces certification ready evidence by connecting requirements, models, tests, generated code, and analysis results into traceable, review ready artifacts aligned to DO 178 objectives.

Topics include

• Establish bidirectional traceability from requirements to models, tests, and code artifacts
• Generate verification results and coverage evidence aligned with DO 178 objectives
• Automate code generation and code level analysis within a qualifiable toolchain
• Package review ready certification artifacts to reduce rework and improve audit readiness

Hands-on Workshop: Applying Model‑Based Design to DO‑178C Certification Using Quadcopter Mission Logic

This hands‑on workshop applies the certification workflows discussed in the overview session using a quadcopter application. The focus of the exercise is on evaluating and verifying mission‑mode logic to support compliance with DO‑178C objectives for airborne software systems.

Participants work within a controlled project in which they verify a quadcopter's object tracking mode logic. The scenario is used to examine how Model‑Based Design workflows support requirements traceability, verification completeness, and certification evidence development.

During the workshop, participants apply certification‑relevant activities to:

• Check models for conformance with high‑integrity modeling standards
• Create test cases and link them to requirements
• Execute test suites and identify gaps in model test coverage

The workshop emphasizes interactive evaluation of models, tests, and coverage results, supporting an in‑person environment where certification artifacts and verification outcomes can be examined, discussed, and refined.

Session overview
This introductory workshop provides hands-on experience with MathWorks’ MBSE platform, System Composer. Together we will work through designing a quadcopter system to demonstrate a Requirements, Functional, Logical, and Physical (RFLP) methodology. This will highlight System Composer’s ability to accelerate design iterations and leverage MathWorks’ suite of tools for analysis and simulation.

Topics include

• Requirements decomposition
• Profiles and stereotypes to extend and customize the architecture modeling language
• Links, allocations, and interfaces
• SWAP-c analysis for design trade-offs
• Simulink integration
• Modeling and viewing system behavior and structure