In 2018, I published a ten-part blog series applying MBSE to an autonomous vehicle. That series continues to garner views on our website, but the state-of-the-art has advanced dramatically. In particular, the emergence of the Digital Thread concept has changed how we think about Digital Engineering (DE) and Integrated Digital Engineering Environments (IDEE). In a continuation of this series in 2025, I will revisit the original model in light of the latest capabilities.

 Figure 1 Federated Digital Thread 

Figure 1 illustrates our concept of a Digital Thread. The many models specifying a cyberphysical system reside in their home repositories where they are created, evolved and maintained. A digital thread platform such as Syndeia creates a system-specific set of inter-model connections between model artifacts. This is not just a set of point-to-point connectors that enable traceability matrices or data transformation. The digital thread is a means of making system data in multiple independent data repositories available in a connected, organized and readily accessible form to all authorized users. As such, it is a key knowledge-sharing and program management tool to enable organizations to deliver complex systems on time, on budget and with first time quality.

 Figure 2 Syndeia Architecture 

Since 2018, our digital thread platform Syndeia (Figure 2) has evolved significantly as an enterprise application. The network-based core component

• Accesses the Data Sources through their APIs,
• Creates and maintains the graph of inter-model connections, and
• Provides all this data through its own REST API to a variety of Data Consumers to support a range of stakeholder needs.

Since 2018, this flexible architecture has enabled new capabilities in

• Project partitioning and security
• Data reporting
• Graph analysis and visualization
• Custom scripts and dashboards
• Digital pipelines
• Agentic AI

We will be applying many of these new capabilities to our original autonomous vehicle model in the forthcoming posts.

 Figure 3 Digital Thread Schema for Autonomous Vehicle from Parts 1-10 of this series 

Figure 3 shows what we called the Total System Model schema in Parts 1-10, but which we now refer to as the digital thread schema. Over the course of that series, we built this thread

• Transforming requirements from Jama and DOORS NG to the SysML model in Cameo
• Elaborating the function, structure and testing elements within Cameo
• Linking SysML functions to JIRA, Simulink and GitHub elements
• Transforming SysML structural elements to a Teamcenter BOM
• Linking SysML test elements to TestRail, with further links back to JIRA and GitHub.

As we stated previously, this specific schema is not mandated by Syndeia, simply our choice for purposes of illustration. Neither are the tools chosen; Syndeia has full semantic integrations to over 30 widely-used engineering software tools.

 Figure 4 Example of the Digital Thread Explorer visualization in the Syndeia Web Dashboard 

In the following blog posts in this series, we will demonstrate some of these current capabilities and offer a few glimpses of the future

• Part 11 - Model-Based Systems Engineering for Autonomous Vehicles – Digital Threads (This Part)
• Part 12 – An introduction to Digital Thread Projects, Relations, Baselines and the Syndeia Web Dashboard 
• Part 13 – Reports, Graph Analysis and the Digital Thread Explorer 
  
• Part 14 – Open REST API for scripts, Jupyter notebooks and project metrics (To be released)
• Part 15 – Digital Pipelines (To be released)
• Part 16 – Custom Dashboards (To be released)
• Part 17 - Digital Threads for Agentic AI (To be released)

Missed the earlier parts? Check them out here.

To evaluate Syndeia with your own toolset, or just to discuss your requirements and use cases, send your questions and requests to www.intercax.com/help and let us help you adopt best practices in Digital Engineering.