Integrating Model-Based Systems Engineering and Fault Management to Enable Autonomous Space Missions

Fully autonomous space mission operations require the ability to detect faults and compensate for them without human intervention. As NASA pushes forward with the Artemis program and upcoming deep-space science missions, increased system autonomy and resiliency have become key technology needs. Autonomous operations rely on fault management (FM) software to detect and mitigate issues in space automatically. Designing such missions requires a multi-disciplinary approach that connects FM with model-based systems engineering (MBSE) to ensure resilient, fault-tolerant systems are architected, modeled, and integrated during the design phase. NASA often employs SysML as the framework for its model-based SE process.

Despite their close relationship in practice, system health management (SHM) and FM have typically not been tightly integrated with systems engineering (SE). SHM/FM is often incorporated only after a nominal system is designed, essentially acting as a bandage fix rather than preventing problems. Additionally, SE and SHM/FM often involve separate subject-matter experts with stove-piped knowledge repositories, leading to inconsistent modeling methodologies and potential inefficiencies throughout the mission life cycle.

To address this, the NASA-funded Qualtech Systems Inc. (QSI) team is integrating SHM/FM directly within the MBSE process from the beginning of a project. This approach was successfully demonstrated with the model-based generation of a failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) and fault trees using early design information from NASA's HelioSwarm mission. A key task was connecting SHM/FM to the SE process, which coordinates, cross-checks, and integrates system elements during design, specification, and verification and validation.

NASA awarded QSI a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract to develop FM capabilities and enhancements to its commercially available toolset, TEAMS®. TEAMS resulted from commercialization of the company's earlier NASA-sponsored SBIR work. The contract aims to support HelioSwarm and other NASA heliophysics missions.