Welcome to PDE 2010 in Norway

Hans Peter de Koning is the responsible ESA man for this activity more or less since it all started at The NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre back in 1997.
- Can you give your deepest ideas/vision regarding PDE? Why is it so important?

- Reliable electronic exchange of the data needed during the life cycle of a (space) system is essential to further improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the engineering processes, and indeed all other life cycle activities and processes, de Koning answers.

He continues to point out that unfortunately, as many projects have experienced too often, getting the right data at the right moment to the right stakeholder is an enormous challenge. Finding the right version of the data and details of changes from previous versions can be very inefficient and frustrating. Now that all individual disciplines, both engineering (e.g. mechanical, electrical, optical, radiofrequency communication, software) and non-engineering (e.g. cost, project management) in space projects have well established methods and tools, the next round of improvements needs to come from better integration of the life cycle processes and the project teams.

- It is impossible to standardize the (ICT) tools that are used across the whole space industry, due to the different business goals of the customers and suppliers, the existence of legacy systems and the cost and schedule impacts of developing software applications, he says.

It is also not desirable according to de Koning to standardize the database tools because:

- The use of different tools promotes innovation and healthy competition between the tool developers, and therefore ultimately benefits the end-users.
- Subcontractors and lower-tier suppliers should not be required to master the complete set of tools that are used by all their customers and prime contractors. Being obliged to use many different tools, and to acquire and maintain skills in each of them, often implies prohibitive license and training costs, in particular for small and medium size enterprises.

Therefore open data exchange and archiving standards and interfaces are needed.

- Can you tell about a case where lack of decent PDE tools would have made the case close to impossible to fulfill?

- In space projects there is always a large international industrial consortium to perform the development. In particular in large scientific space projects with cooperation between e.g. ESA and NASA or JAXA often different CAD and CAE tools are used. In order to enable joint system level analysis and verification, check interfaces etc. we must have reliable exchange of models and results in order to bring the project to a good end, de Koning answers. Many different tools and languages, but one common shareable set of data. Without it nothing works.

- Finally, can you tell a little bit about your job in ESA? Just enough to give is a brief view, to put your PDE interest in perspective.

- Within ESA I work mainly on two subjects: space thermal analysis and data exchange standardization. Space thermal analysis is my original main subject as I had graduated in Applied Physics from Delft University of Technology specializing in numerical heat transfer, and working in space industry as thermal engineer before joining ESA.

In order to fulfill the need for the exchange of thermal analysis models between different space thermal analysis tools I was the main developer of the open STEP-TAS protocol to provide a neutral format. This work took a long time but resulted in a very well adopted solution that is used in many space projects since 2003. Currently STEP-TAS is being supported with import/export facilities for at least five major space thermal analysis tools.

Gradually the work done on thermal data exchange standardization evolved into more general data exchange standardization work in the frame of ECSS (European Cooperation of Space Standardization), in particular two Technical Memoranda: E-TM-10-23 "Engineering database" and E-TM-10-25 "System Engineering - Engineering design model data exchange (CDF)". The first one is an ambitious long term development to create a common conceptual data model for all data in the space system life cycle, using the systems engineering data as a hub to share and consolidate the data from all other disciplines. The second one is more a short term model for the exchange of all data needed in early development phases 0 and A (mission need and analysis, feasibility study, conceptual design) and exchanging the data between concurrent design facilities, de Koning answers. He is obviously ready for PDE 2010 in Norway. Are you?