QUALTECH SYSTEMS, INC. — National Aeronautics and Space Administration SBIR Phase I: S5

Description

NASA uses a variety of tools to conduct its FM activities. However, these tools are varied and disjoint, and require manual intervention to transfer data from the output of one tool to the input of another. This process is tedious, error-prone and scales poorly for large, complex systems. In addition, these tools are often ldquo;silorsquo;edrdquo; to the singular functionality for which they were designed. This prevents FM engineers from gaining insight into the overall system level design and characteristics that are the key to transparency, verifiability and efficiency of implementing and testing FM. FM support tools need to have powerful fault modeling and analytic capabilities to capture their operational procedures and mission complexity. Qualtech Systems, Inc. (QSI), in collaboration with Dr. Stephen B. Johnson, President of Dependable System Technologies, LLC (DST), plans to develop techniques and the concomitant software tools to ldquo;integrate multi-domain datardquo; and ldquo;perform FM architecture tradesrdquo; by leveraging QSIrsquo;s TEAMSreg; (Testability Engineering and Maintenance System) toolset. The solution will provide the capability to cost-effectively create a model, and utilize that model to perform FM architecture studies, both visually/qualitatively, and quantitatively. This ability coupled with the option of using the same model for Operations, will greatly benefit science missions. The main focus of this effort will be to (1) capture diverse and disjoint data products and multi-domain modeling information into TEAMSreg; for standardizing FM Techniques and Processes and improve the productivity of model (knowledge) creation and FM design process, (2) conduct Architecture Trade Studies focusing on FM (including sensor allocation) effectiveness, (3) introduce ancillary capabilities in TEAMSreg; to support the main tasks such as Common Cause Failures (CCFs), Probability of Failure on Demand Failure (PFD), and, .(4) develop an FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis) exchange tool.