The European Space Agency (ESA) has found that when information is exchanged, it is frequently misinterpreted.
In this presentation, Serge Valera of the European Space Agency discusses a fact based modeling solution to the problem of knowledge sharing in ESA.
Environment: A network of customer-supplier relationships: Different organizations, different languages, different countries using legacy & proprietary systems.
Standards: Standard development processes and procedures exist but are interpreted and applied in a non-standard manner.
Serge explains that systems engineering is a modeling problem.
However, whilst modeling is widely used, model interoperability remains a challenge. Today, most organizations address interoperability at the physical level which leads to lots of effort but limited results.
Effective exchange requires semantic interoperability which means that there is a need for a global modeling approach.
Status: The European Cooperation on Space Standardization (ECSS) is now documented in 115 standards that contain more than 23,000 requirements.
However, the ECSS standards express the needs of their stakeholders in an informal way. If the standards could be formalized and validated by the stakeholders, they would be more effective.
ESA is following two approaches: MDA using UML and Fact Based Modeling.
Serge's presentation gives examples that show how ESA's Fact Based Modelling Unifying System (FAMOUS) can be used to solve the problem of semantic interoperability.