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The previous four sections of this blog series have dealt with the characteristics of the digital thread itself and the modeling process. Verification deals with characteristics of the real system that the digital thread models, primarily its performance against requirements. Assuming the results of physical testing, simulation, and analysis are captured within the digital thread,

The digital thread is dynamic. Many of the federated data repositories are configuration-managed, and it is critical for the inter-model connections to be version-sensitive. Consistency of a digital thread implies that the version of a connected data element is the same now as when the connections to it were created or most recently updated. If

The ultimate objective of this activity is Completion, the extent to which all desired characteristics of the digital thread have been realized. As a metric, Completion is strongly correlated with project Schedule, but it is also an indicator of project Risk. Completed segments of the digital thread represent a reduced technical risk of unexpected problems

While Complexity may be a confusing concept, Activity has clearer correlations with cost and schedule. In this post, I will illustrate some of the ways in which systems engineering activity can be calculated and displayed using Syndeia to query the digital thread for our UGV02 project. Figure 1 displays the number of inter-model relations created

The consideration of complexity concerning digital threads is a matter of both good and bad news. The literature on digital complexity metrics is rich with detailed algorithms for graphs and software code, many already available in Python and Gremlin libraries applicable to our demonstration example. On the other hand, the relevance of these to project

While this blog series focuses on the general concept of critical metrics for digital threads, we will illustrate these with actual examples. Commercial and open-source tools are available now to put these ideas into practice. For our example, we need a set of Data Sources, a Data Consumer to calculate and display the critical metrics,