CASP - The Concurrent Approach

The European Space Agency (ESA) has been very successful in applying Concurrent Engineering (CE) in the early phases of space projects. Their Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) is a world leading laboratory for efficient development of complex multi-system projects in the early design phases.

CASP’s approach is to drastically reduce the time to market, cost of development and increase the quality of the Space system.

ESA wants to explore the possibilities to use CE for all phases of space projects. Thus, they contracted Thales Alenia Space and Jotne EPM Technology to make the CASP study, whereas one will focus on the following:

Concurrent Review Facility

Project reviews provide a comprehensive assessment of the project status against targets and requirements. A review may be done on a system or subsystem level, and involves access to technical data and expertise for all domains

System Budget Building

System Budgets Building allows the system engineer to be in contact with all disciplines in a distributed environment to allow system budgets tracking with automated extraction of subsystems/units properties and real-time discussion with all involved actors.

Smart Design Sessions

Through smart design sessions (SDS), space engineering actors can easily access and visualize wide data info to afford complex System issues from different System perspectives (e.g. physical, functional, operational) in a collaborative environment with the possibility to be multi-site.

For Jotne, the CASP project is yet another activity to broadening the use of our technology in the space sector, and builds upon the experience from two ongoing projects, OCDS and TruePLM. OCDS (Open Concurrent Design Server) was delivered to ESA to allow standards based storage of all data in the CDF.