Blog

The current blog series reviewing the RESTful API demo videos is organized around each of five methods authenticating access to an external RESTful API-based repository: no authentication required, basic authentication, and bearer, API key, and dynamic token-based authentication. It also provides an opportunity to show the ways in which five different RESTful repositories can be

There are thousands of model and data repositories that are potentially part of the digital engineering environment for organizations developing complex systems. No engineering software vendor has the resources to build and maintain integrations to even a sizeable fraction of these, especially since many are custom proprietary tools with only a small number of users.

We began this blog series with the idea, captured in the notional diagram in Figure 1, that there is a connection between project management metrics such as schedule, cost, and risk; the characteristics of the digital thread; and the specific queries that a digital thread platform might make. We looked at that connection in greater

In Parts 3 through 7 of this blog series, we have examined critical metrics associated with the digital thread and their relations with project metrics such as cost, schedule and risk.  We illustrated these with specific queries executed through the Syndeia digital thread platform, captured as a script in a Jupyter notebook. These metrics have

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,