An Ontology Based Single Source of Truth (SSOT) Construction Approach for Aircraft Modeling and Simulation

Single source of truth (SSOT) is a key element in the realization of digital engineering or model-based system engineering. During today’s aircraft development, huge number of models are built and simulated for different design purposes at different development stages. This brings a crucial challenge for achieving and maintaining model consistency. The single source of truth is a solution to meet model consistency challenge. It emphasizes on building an authoritative data source and all other models shall refer back to it, so that no inconsistent duplicate exists and model consistency is ensured. In this paper, an ontology based single source of truth construction approach is proposed. Ontology is brought out to provide a generic and language-independent description framework for aircraft and SSOT can be built based on this ontology. Then, with the model transformation mechanism introduced, which defines the matching relations between ontology and models, the reference ontology can be transformed into different kinds of aircraft design models and also support the transformation between different models. To confirm the usability of this approach, a practice of this approach on a fix wing unmanned aircraft system (UAS) development is introduced According to the practice, the ontology based single source of truth construction approach initially confirms its feasibility and usability.